The new Grenfell play delivers a heartbreaking portrait of a community betrayed as the wait for justice goes on

Warm as the first hour is, it is always overshadowed by the knowledge of what is to come. 

We hear Tiago’s recollection of teaching a young boy how to tie his tie on his first day of school, before the crushing realisation that the child he is describing is among the 18 lost in the fire.  

As the play moves into the night of the fire, it transforms into a horror story, as the sparse stage is filled with the noise of emergency calls and radio messages and white lights represent the long, impossible-seeming journey to safety.

When pregnant mother Rabia Yahya describes the way the youngest of her three children gripped onto her as she braced to open the door and guide them down 18 flights of pitch-dark, smoke-logged stairs, you are there with her.  

In the context of a disaster such as Grenfell, these small human details hit with the force of a brick. A sequence near the end when survivors recall the items they lost in the fire is particularly poignant: Turufat Yilma’s memorial box to a stillborn baby or the last photo of Maher Khoudair before he had polio. 

“The play accurately depicts a response that was chaotic and dysfunctional, with serious consequences”

The play also does not shy away from the anger residents feel about the response on the night. 

Discussions of the role race played in the response were controversial when they were aired at the inquiry. But here, when Hanan Wahabi explains her belief that people with minority ethnic accents were treated differently when they called the emergency services, recordings of their calls are played back – and it is hard to dispute her point. 

Neither can you hear about families reached by firefighters – but told to wait for help that was simply not going to come and left alone again in flats with small children – without understanding why this is still so upsetting for their relatives.  

This is not to say the play throws emergency responders under the bus. We hear from firefighters and call room operatives about the impossible situations they faced. But the play accurately depicts a response that was chaotic and dysfunctional, with serious consequences.

It also finds space for the story of wider political and corporate failings. 

Excerpts from the public inquiry are short, but judiciously selected to get across reasonably well the scandal surrounding the fire testing of products by the corporations that made the materials used in the cladding system: Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex. It is particularly effective at communicating the appalling treatment residents received during the tower’s refurbishment.

An archive clip of a fresh-faced David Cameron explaining the importance of cutting red tape is suitably chilling, as one of the actors breaks character to explain how a focus on deregulation led us from a position where combustible materials were effectively banned in London to one where they became ubiquitous. 

(A note – these words were actually mine. I gave an interview to the producers, with this excerpt used and a credit given in the programme notes. But this was my only involvement, and doesn’t impact on my review.) 

It does need to be said, though, that this is now the third major verbatim play about Grenfell to hit the West End. There has also been a film by Steve McQueen, which used footage of the burned-out tower; a BBC drama is in the works; and several books have been written. 

“All these stories feel incomplete while the community is still waiting for justice”

Art and culture have a contribution to make in helping society understand what happened, but all these stories feel incomplete while the community is still waiting for justice. 

It is not the fault of this play or any of the other works on Grenfell that the criminal prosecution is progressing so slowly. Indeed, their contribution to building a wider understanding of what happened and increased empathy with those who suffered can only help. 

But it is to be hoped that the next time this evidence is aired in front of a public audience in London, it is running a mile or so east from the National Theatre at Southwark Crown Court or just over Blackfriars Bridge at the Old Bailey. 

This is what the play’s writer, Gillian Slovo, has said she wants to see. Her play closes with a short film that features real survivors and bereaved, who encourage the audience out into the London night to join them in their struggle for justice and change.  

“We need you to see yourselves in us,” Karim Mussilhy, who lost his uncle in the blaze, says in the clip. This play is as powerful a means as you could imagine to make that happen. 

Peter Apps, deputy editor, Inside Housing, and author, Show Me the Bodies