The Words of Grenfell Survivors Hit Centre Stage

‘It was like a burnt matchbox in the sky / It was black and long and burnt in the sky’, begins Ben Okri’s haunting poem about the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017. The poem memorializes, in spare yet scalding prose, the 72 lives lost and dozens injured in the fire, which spread quickly through the building’s 23 floors via its highly flammable exterior cladding. The tragedy not only raised immediate concerns about fire safety regulations and shoddy building materials, but also prompted, in the years that followed, an official inquiry into the causes of and responses to the fire. In the intervening years, the Grenfell disaster has become the subject of a film, two plays – Value Engineering: Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry (2021) and GRENFELL: SYSTEM FAILURE (2023), and a long essay by the journalist Andrew O’Hagan, published in the London Review of Books in 2018.

A new play by Gillian Slovo, Grenfell: in the words of survivors, which closed last week at St. Ann’s Warehouse and is streaming on the National Theatre’s website, is the latest play to examine the tragedy. It begins with each actor introducing him or herself as the resident they will play, and explaining how they came to live in the Tower. One resident, Turufat, emigrated from Ethiopia to escape the ‘political unrest’ in her home country. Another handicapped resident left Syria for England in 2001. Then an unusual request follows: the actors ask the audience to turn to the person sitting next to them and introduce themselves. Before it was engulfed in tragedy, the Tower was, as one resident remembers, ‘one big family’, and in the enclosed space of the theatre, the actors carve out a space, however brief, for a sense of community to be established.

Structural issues with the Tower predated – and paved the way for – the fire. In the first part of the play, we hear from residents who complain about the lift breaking down and stopping abruptly. The Tower’s Tenant Management Organization ‘became more and more unresponsive to the actual tenants as time went by.’ In one meeting in 2008, officers from the Council even admitted to residents that they considered Grenfell Tower a ‘blight’ on the area of North Kensington. Frustrated by the lack of action from municipal authorities, residents convened the Grenfell Action Group in 2012 to call attention to the fact that their housing estate had deteriorated into ‘a near slum.’ One group member, Ed, recalls that ‘portable firefighting equipment was out of test date according to the label on the extinguishers, and some located in the roof level areas had “condemned” written on them.’ The Tower ended up being refurbished, not to nip safety issues in the bud, but for aesthetic reasons.

Yet the renovated building was in many respects no better off than the old one: one resident’s door disconnected from its hinges, and when a repair man came, he took the door’s self-closing mechanism and failed to return with a replacement. Floor numbers were completely scrambled, such that a person living on the fourth floor ended up living on the seventh after the refurbishment. Signs in the stairways were not properly updated; according to one resident, ‘the numbers were just stencilled onto the walls.’ Faced with a list of housing-related grievances, the Tenant Management Organization eventually stirred itself to carry out an internal review. Yet the review ‘was so inaccurate as to be unbelievable [...], for example they said there were only five complaints’, recalls a resident named Judith. Ed presciently notes that ‘it’s gonna take a catastrophe here before the council wakes up to what’s really going on’. He concludes: ‘the fire was a logical conclusion of a borough council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, that was failing to scrutinize a landlord that was failing to implement health and safety.’

No images of the fire are displayed during the play’s three hours, but internal test reports and damning memos are occasionally displayed on large screens in the theatre. For the most part, Grenfell derives its visceral power from the voices of people caught in the conflagration: we hear people outside the Tower phoning the fire brigade to report an outbreak of fire in the early morning hours, and speaking in panicky tones with their spouses about the ‘stay put’ mandate. (As O'Hagan noted in his piece, adhering to the policy ‘meant that at no point did fire chiefs order a full evacuation of the building.’ Neighbours relied on each other for up-to-date information.) When a firefighter arrives on the scene in the second part of the play, he recalls experiencing ‘complete sensory deprivation from the moment of putting our masks on.’ Further problems of communication ensue when he summarily assumes that a Middle Eastern woman wearing a headscarf doesn’t speak English.

Layered on top of one another, the testimonials subtly but convincingly make the case that ‘there are no accidents’, to borrow the title of Jessie Singer’s provocative book on the non-randomness of purportedly accidental deaths . Among the several consequential decisions leading up to the fire was one to introduce insulation between cladding panels; it’s later revealed that ‘the gap acted as a chimney on the night of the fire.’ A cast member further informs us that ‘to save costs, they decided to change from zinc cladding, which is not flammable, to aluminium composite cladding, which burnt like liquid petrol.’ A representative from Arconic, the American company that made the cladding, indicated in an email, displayed on a large screen, that the cladding had essentially failed an internal test (it received an "F" rating), but nevertheless proceeded to work in countries like Britain ‘with national regulations which are not as restrictive.’ More horrid information surfaces in the aftermath. One resident relates that ‘over 3,500 repairs [were] still outstanding’ at the time of the fire. Go back far enough in time and any so-called accident starts to look like the natural culmination of a series of poor decisions.

As an autopsy of a systemic disaster that mostly affected a working-class community, Grenfell recalls an earlier genre of Living Newspapers – plays produced during the New Deal era that combined social commentary with documentary realism – most notably Arthur Arent’s One Third of a Nation (1938), which was produced under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project. That play, as James Shapiro notes in his forthcoming book The Playbook, used verbatim speeches from US senators drawn from the Congressional Record, and was bracketed by two fires that licked the four stories of a cramped New York tenement. It was credited with exposing the root causes of substandard housing in New York and was later adapted into a film.

That Grenfell is set in a small borough in London rather than the US should be no bar to attracting audiences here. James Baldwin wrote in No Name in the Street (1972) that ‘if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony.’ Wrenchingly, unforgettably, Grenfell does just that.

^{Main image: The company and audience of Grenfell outside of St. Ann’s Warehouse, ‘Grenfell: in the words of survivors’, 2024, St. Ann’s Warehouse. Courtesy: St. Ann’s Warehouse; photograph: Teddy Wolff}