It had once been highly regarded by the local council - a ‘60s replacement for old, unsafe slum housing - but had increasingly become viewed as a drag on the wealthy borough. Things that spring out: Grenfell sounds like it was by and large a pretty nice place. In the first half – entirely focussed on the time before the fire – we meet the 12 survivors who form the play’s core cast of characters. But for me Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike’s co-production really, really worked.įirstly, it is a meticulous documentary-style explainer as to the background of the tragedy. I’m sometimes cynical of stuff like this: the idea that maybe there’s a well-meaning desire to ‘respond’ to a tragedy that feels more like a show of solidarity than meaningful art. That doesn’t mean the script just appeared one day: it is the culmination of years of interviews conducted with Grenfell survivors and written into a text by the writer Gillian Slovo. ‘Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors’ is a verbatim play: that is to say it has a script performed by actors that’s edited from real words that were really spoken by the people being depicted. You know all this, but it feels right to put the context up front and centre rather than coyly drip-drip it in. Of the tower’s diverse, largely working-class population, 72 people died, many of them children, in part thanks to ‘stay in place’ fire regulations that ordered people to remain in their flats in the case of a fire. In the early hours of June 14, 2017, a flat fire at the council-owned Grenfell Tower in North Kensington spread across the entire 24 storey residential building, thanks to the recent installation of cheap flammable cladding that was illegal in much of Europe.
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