Playground theatre, London
Writer Richard Norton-Taylor and director Nicolas Kent’s almost anti-theatrical play uses residents’ testimonies and gives the bereaved a much-needed voice
Staged a few minutes away from Grenfell Tower, this play drawn from the inquiry into the 2017 inferno that took 72 lives has audience members who experienced the disaster firsthand and have seen accountability avoided for causes and responses. “They’ve got away with it,” a survivor sitting close to me says in the interval. The system, they add, “is not set up for us”.
That’s why the official inquiry – bringing truth to light and due to report later this year – is so crucial. Since 1994, writer Richard Norton-Taylor and director Nicolas Kent have created a series of forensic tribunal plays. Grenfell: Value Engineering (2021) distilled the inquiry’s first phase; this follow-up details the endemic responsibility dodging – commercial and regulatory – that nurtured calamity. A civil servant claims “fire safety is a very subjective subject”; petulant Lord Pickles (played by Howard Crossley) huffs at interrogation.
Grenfell: System Failure is at the Playground theatre, London, until 25 February; the Tabernacle, London, 27 February-12 March; and Marylebone theatre, London, 14-26 March.
