The company and audience of Grenfell outside of St. Ann’s Warehouse. Photo: Teddy Wolff
The second to last speech of Grenfell: in the words of survivors, the National Theatre production now playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse, encapsulates so much that works and doesn’t work in this documentary-style play. Talking about the single box of her family’s possessions that survived the infamous, horrific fire, Turufat (Nahel Tzegai) says, “We get now and then question from our son ‘Why you not open?’ We just tell him one day, one day.” It is a potent, heartfelt, moving moment, charged with the injustice of the past and hope for the future. It’s also more than two and a half hours into the evening and approximately twenty (long) minutes from the end of the show.
The show takes its title from the low-income London housing project that caught fire in 2017, killing seventy-two residents. In the first act, the characters recount the governmental neglect, mismanagement, and social apathy toward the building’s working-class residents that led to the tragedy. The second act walks the audience through the fateful night almost minute by minute, painting a graphic picture of the horrors the characters underwent. You feel the difficulty of the life or death choices they face. Should they follow the government’s “Stay Put” directive or flee, as instinct dictates? Tell the truth to a trapped relative and enflame panic or lie and be complicit in their fate?
Playwright Gillian Slovo employs a technique pioneered by writer Emily Mann in the late 1970s, where real-life personal testimony is spoken verbatim by actors (or, in the work of the wonderful Anna Deavere Smith, a single actor). Hearing the words of Grenfell’s former residents is powerful medicine, and Slovo does a very good job of weaving together many survivors’ experiences to form a compelling emotional narrative, especially in the second act.
Theater of testimony has its drawbacks—frequently, that parallel monologues lack dramatic conflict and can feel disconnected. Slovo attempts to solve this by including material from the subsequent official inquiry into the fire. It’s a delicate balance; the inquiry material can be dry and distract from the unfolding tragedy, but it does counterbalance what might otherwise feel structurally monotonous.
The biggest problem with Slovo’s script is there’s too much of it. The first act drags, the second act refuses to end, and the cast size, every one of them a protagonist, creates a barrier to empathy. I understand the author’s dilemma: cutting any of these compelling characters, or failing to mention any of the government’s infuriating failures, might feel like it would weaken the play. But by not making these difficult decisions, the playwright gives us less, especially since the characters of note are all residents, with perspectives that are more or less the same.
The actors are uniformly great. I’ll single out Houda Echouafni, who, as Rabia Yahya, gives a devastating monologue at the play’s second-act climax. The performers really work as a team—a testament to directors Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike. The creative team likewise does solid work, from Azusa Ono’s crisp, appropriately dramatic lighting, to Donato Wharton’s sometimes subtle sound design, to Georgia Lowe’s understated set and costumes.
If only they had stuck to theater. Almost three hours into the evening, a screen is lowered and a documentary plays, featuring the real Grenfell residents. While it’s interesting to see the people the actors have been portraying, it made me feel like what I’d been watching up to that point had been fake, an odd juxtaposition to Theater of Testimony’s purpose. I also got a little distracted from what the real people were saying by trying so hard to figure out who was who.
Bottom line: after a full evening of pretty good theater, I felt trapped (and horrible at feeling that way given the piece’s subject, people who really were trapped in a life or death situation). Nor was the movie the end; after the documentary, the audience is handed signs and transformed into demonstrators demanding justice for Grenfell. Instead of being trusted to react to the horrific events, we were being told how to feel and what to do. My natural sympathy drained away, and resentfulness replaced compassion. It was a sour end to the evening.