Five years after the fire, this devastating verbatim play based on the Grenfell inquiry leaves the question hanging: 72 dead – so why still no arrests?
In 2021, the not-for-profit play Grenfell: Value Engineering – Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry ran at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, west London, then at the Birmingham Rep. It was a verbatim dramatisation of testimony from the Grenfell Tower inquiry. A performance from the Tabernacle is televised here in two parts, with the simplified title of Grenfell (Channel 4). Jon Snow introduces it with a short and devastating explanation of why this play exists. He recalls meeting 12-year-old Firdaws Hashim two months before the fire, when he chaired a schools essay competition, which she won. She died in the fire, along with her parents and two brothers. The hope, says Snow, is that nothing like this will ever happen again.
After seeing this gruesome account of buck-passing and repeated denials of corporate culpability, I am not sure that hope is what we are left with. It has been five years since the Grenfell fire. It is worth watching this production while remembering that still now, no criminal charges have been brought. During the Jubilee celebrations, the community group Justice4Grenfell laid out a street party table in the shadow of the tower, inscribing the plates with the names of the victims and the words, “72 dead. And still no arrests? How come?”
