Review: GRENFELL: SYSTEM FAILURE SCENES FROM THE INQUIRY, Playground Theatre

If you saw Value Engineering Scenes From The Grenfell Inquiry, the intervening 18 months just fall away.

We get the vaguely soothing blue backdrop, the one-notch-above MFI desks and Thomas Wheatley in the Chair as Sir Martin Moore-Bick and Ron Cook, his verbal scapel at the ready as Richard Millett QC. And the same feelings well up too - the anger rising in your gorge, the horror at the events described and the contempt for those on the stand, wriggling pathetically to get off the hook.

Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent have again edited transcripts of the inquiry to construct an extraordinary piece of verbatim theatre, a torrent of words to render us speechless. Though, like a majority of the audience, I have not attended a session of the (now completed) inquiry, I certainly feel like I was there, the usual metaphor reversed - this is great theatre as an event.

Wisely addressing (to some extent) the imbalance of voices in the first play, the first and last testimony we hear is from Hisam Chocair (Shahzad Ali), who lost members of his family in the blaze - he confirms the appalling treatment of victims in the immediate aftermath. If the first play's unifying theme was the cost-cutting that led to the disaster, this second play, as its title suggests, focuses more on how bureaucracies charged with protecting people chose instead to punish them - Mr Choucair is a representative voice of so many, dead and living.

A sorry procession of buck-passers, inadequates and moral vacuums proceed to condemn themselves out of their own mouths and through the documents flashed on the screen in inarguable black and white text. Civil servants miss opportunity after opportunity to do something about the deadly cladding that fuelled the flames; experts hide behind communications protocols that blocked communications; a government minister finds the whole thing beneath him.

Though the Chair is inscrutable in his neutrality (Moore-Bick's report is due this Autumn and will, I'm sure, use cold legal prose to land blow after blow on those who so thoroughly deserve it), Ron Cook allows a little impatience and frustration into his QC's demeanour. It's another well-judged interjection of acting nuance into a performance that really should be recognised by awards.

At least there is some regret on the witness stand. London Fire Brigade's Andy Roe (David Michaels) is a little self-congratulatory in his report on abandoning the disastrous 'Stay Put' policy as the inferno raged, but it did take guts to do that and he acknowledges that the LFB had got things wrong. Sophie Duval and Nigel Betts leave us with the impression that their experts have suffered a few sleepless nights and, though they are not worthy of our sympathy, a common humanity makes me hope that they are getting the support they need to deal with mistakes, the impact of which will be with them to the grave.

Only the last witness from the authority figures catches anything that approaches the morally correct tone. Nick Hurd (beautifully played by David Michaels), charged with advising the government both during his time as an MP and after he stood down from Parliament in 2019, expresses shame, points a very pointed finger at members of his own party and finds it in his heart to say the right things. It's an important counterbalance to what has gone before, showing that the witnesses from whom we have heard did not need to be so self-serving, so devoid of empathy, so inhuman.

There does seem to have been an improvement in the living arrangements for the ex-residents of the Tower and their causes are now are truth and justice. The former, from what we have seen in these two important theatrical events, seems likely to be delivered; the latter remains to be seen. The dead, whose names again stand in place of a curtain, call for justice from beyond the grave and their cries must, must be heeded.

Grenfell: System Failure Scenes From The Inquiry is at the Playground Theatre until 25 February and then at The Tabernacle and the Marylebone Theatre in March

Photo Credit: Tristram Kenton

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