“Grenfell” is documentary theater about an infamous 2017 fire in a 24-story public housing project in London called Grenfell Tower that killed 72 people. Subtitled “In the words of survivors,” the show uses verbatim accounts by survivors and from an official public inquiry to make the ironclad case that the catastrophe was a direct result of greed, neglect, incompetence and British Conservative policy.
Grenfell is an ongoing injustice. Seven years later, nobody has been held accountable; nobody is in jail.
“This was never ‘just a play’,” said Phyllida Lloyd, the co-director of the show, a production of the National Theatre that’s at St. Ann’s Warehouse through May 12. “We wanted the audience to feel part of something and to leave outraged, moved, and activated.”
That’s not how I left.
At the start of “Grenfell,” eleven cast members come out one by one to introduce both themselves and the real-life character they are portraying (and, then, awkwardly, ask audience members to introduce ourselves to each other.) The survivors recall one by one why they liked living at Grenfell, most of it mundane (“It was a tower block but it was home”) but every now and then evocative, especially of the largely immigrant make-up of the residents ( “Every floor had smells of different cuisines. And different music. Moroccan music on the top floor and then in the middle layer someone listening to reggae music.”) We get a glimpse of individual lives and of their sense of community.
The costume design by Georgia Lowe helps distinguish among them. There is also a simple but effective means of establishing when the performers start also portraying officials – they don a suit jacket, and appear as talking heads on video monitors as they talk on stage in real time. The set, also designed by Lowe, is even simpler: It’s in the round, with each character carrying a cardboard box, used sometimes as a seat, sometimes piled up to suggest a tower, near the end, to suggest a container for the few remaining personal items that survivors were able to save from the fire.
The survivors and other characters detail the history that led inexorably to the deaths — a horrendous pile-up of attitudes and actions (and inaction.) Two striking examples:
- “After the great fire of London in 1666,” cast member Nahel Tzegai tells us, “they made a rule that you can’t use combustible materials on the outside of buildings—you could only use stone or brick, and eventually, concrete. Some say that’s one of the reasons why London survived the bombings of WWII.”Cast member Houda Echouafni continues: “In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s government changed those rules. They said they did this to encourage innovation – and it’s true the regulations were out of date – but the changes they made helped the construction industry cut costs: what they often called red tape had been stopping them from using cheaper materials.”
Those cheaper materials, in the case of the renovations of Grenfell, were highly flammable. An American company that sold the material for new cladding for Grenfell Tower knew it was highly flammable; indeed, American regulations prevented them from selling it in the United States.
2. Why was Grenfell renovated at all ? The weird answer is: The Julia Roberts film “Notting Hill.” As Nick Burton (portrayed by Ash Hunter) points out, the 1999 film set in the neighborhood accelerated its gentrification. This led to an attitude toward Grenfell residents, summed up by another resident, Edward Daffarn (portrayed by Michael Shaeffer): “Why should these people live in this area of London?” The renovations were launched – adding flammable outer cladding to what were the original solid non-flammable concrete walls – in order to prettify the tower, not to make it more livable nor more safe; it did just the opposite.
After listening to the tenants’ accounts, it’s easy to conclude that the people in charge – from public officials to building management — couldn’t have done a better job of creating the conditions for a disaster if they had set out deliberately to do so. Firefighters, for example, had a hard time locating tenants in need of rescue because the management had changed all the apartment numbers.
After the intermission, much of Act II is taken up with a moment-by-moment account of the fire – or, more precisely, the varying characters’ moment-by-moment perceptions of what was happening, interspersed with Q&A interviews with various officials from the subsequent public inquiry.
The account by Rabia Yahya (Echouafni) who was pregnant and the mother of three kids, initially alternates with that of a firefighter who had told her to stay put in her apartment, promising they would come back to rescue her. But they never did. She made her way with her children to the stairwell. “It was thick smoke, pitch black, I couldn’t cover my face ‘cause I was scared I was going to lose one of the kids just letting go so my towel fell off…. My eldest was very vocal. She kept shouting: What floor are we on, what floor are we on?….My son collapsed. He was just, the smoke got to him and he just fell unconscious.” They finally made it to the first floor, and had to be escorted out: “Riot shields had to be above our heads because the things were just dropping, I mean it was just the amount of debris just kept dropping…. I remember looking up at the building as soon as I got out and it was literally alight. I couldn’t see any bit of it that wasn’t on fire..”
This is just a small excerpt from just one character’s account, which I’m piecing together without the interrupting lines by other characters. Remember, there are performers portraying eleven main characters, and a variety of other people. It’s too much.
It’s hard to give a clear-eyed review of such a well-meaning play, when the event it’s chronicling was a real-life horror. How do you separate the “theater” from the “documentary” without sounding heartless?
But the last half-hour of the three-hour production made this easier for me. First, a quarter of the audience is asked to get up from their seats in the in-the-round theater, and sit on the floor so that a screen can roll down and we can all watch a video of some of the actual survivors whom the performers have been portraying. The people in the video first make comments and then participate in a rally with signs saying “Greenfell,” “Remember,” “Injustice,” etc. Then, the audience members are asked to stand up, handed protest signs exactly like the ones the survivors were carrying in the video, and are led out to the St. Ann’s courtyard as if part of a march. It’s an obvious effort to make the audience (as director Lloyd has said) “feel part of something” and leave “activated.” I felt manipulated.
Let’s put aside the question of the many unjust horrors competing for our attention that can call us to action. (If we’re concerned about unsafe housing, how about some catastrophes closer to home, like the Surfside, Florida condo collapse in 2021 that caused the death of 98 people, or the ongoing hazard in New York of thousands of unlicensed basement apartments, which resulted in the death of eleven New Yorkers, also in 2021, who drowned because of flooding during Hurricane Ida?) The problem for me with “Grenfell” is not the urge to activism around this seven-year-old incident in London. But after sitting through hours of survivor testimony and investigative details – we learn a great deal about Arconic’s REYNOBOND PE cassette cladding and Stay Put policy, and new government regulations called Approved Document B – what became apparent to me is that the urge to activism hinders the crafting of the raw material into the most effective storytelling.
If John Hersey could tell the story of the bombing of Hiroshima, which killed some 100,000 people and left some 100,000 survivors, in a universally acclaimed book that focuses on just six survivors, “Grenfell” could, too, have focused on six survivors, and told the horrid tale in ninety minutes, adding to the playbill any omitted details thought to be important. The playbill already features an extensive two-page timeline, from the 1960s all the way up to “April 12, 2024: It has been announced that the publication of the Phase Two inquiry has been delayed for the third time. Until Phase Two of the report has been published, no criminal charges will be made.”
Grenfell: In The Words of Survivors
St. Ann’s Warehouse through May 12
Running time: Three hours including one intermission
Tickets: $34 – $74
Written by Gillian Slovo
Co-Directed by Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike
Set and costume design by Georgia Lowe, lighting design by Azusa Ono,sound design by Donato Wharton,video design by Akhila Krishnan,composed by Benjamin Kwasi Burrell,movement director Chi-San Howard
Cast: Joe Alessi,Gaz Choudhry,Jackie Clune,Houda Echouafni,Mona Goodwin,Keaton Guimarães-Tolley,Ash Hunter, Rachid Sabitri, Michael Shaeffer,Dominique Tipper, and Nahel Tzegai.
