They Should Have Been Safe: Grenfell: In The Words of Survivors, National Theatre, London
I approached this play with trepidation. Given that it is about the trauma of others, was it ethical? Traumatising? In going to see it was I behaving exploitatively?
Resoundingly no is my conclusion. Whilst not a documentary, performers are very careful to delineate themselves as performers as and against the real people, the creators of the original words. Surprisingly the play is delivered through screens — presentations and ‘media’ footage as well as a foray into the properties and dynamics of building materials.
Throughout the performers are keen to promote a safe and inclusive space — from encouraging the audience to speak to people they don’t know at the beginning to a creative silent vigil at the end, to reflect and remember and celebrate the survivors and the whole Grenfell community’s tenacity and love. Rather than taking applause in a traditional way, the actors left us (the audience) to reflect for as long as we liked on the vigil symbols at the end. Just before this we’d seen a short film of the real people (whose lives we’d seen portrayed in the play) speaking. Additionally a physical safe space with safe people was provided — the audience were encouraged to leave and comforted that ‘actors would get out of their way if they were in it’. There’s a lot to learn here about traditional theatre creating safe and welcoming spaces for first time theatre goers.
A warning though — if you in any way care about people, you will come away furiously angry and feeling that English contemporary society, culture, systems, politics, building regulations are rotten. Nonetheless the play encourages us to not stay there, but to be more Grenfell community — to fight in unity, to show love and compassion for others, to be aware, to champion justice, to speak out, to really care practically, as well as being indignant at an event— which truly shouldn’t have happened and was preventable if cost cutting measures had not been made, if tenants and residents had been listened to and taken seriously, if the research about flammable building materials had been pushed and not offered on request, if the council estate community had been valued as much as their multi-millionaire neighbours on surrounding streets.
Most scandalous of all is the way people were treated. We meet a selection of the community in the first half, get to know them, warm to them; they are us, being amongst us, greeting us during the audience chat. It’s almost too much to bear when this terrible series of events starts to happen to them, because it could be us, and we’ve learnt to care for them, heard their hopes, dreams, histories. Learnt to love them and to laugh with them — although there is tragedy here, there are an awful lot of laughs too.
Nevertheless, systems and authorities, those they thought they could trust failed them — riot police were sent in to protect people from falling debris. (Riot police in a situation of trauma?!!!) A mother was almost forcibly separated from her children by ambulance providers and medics. Those with accents were given a different treatment and level of support to those who didn’t, and it cost them their lives. Indeed, those taking the calls were clearly overwhelmed by the level of panic they were trying to deal with, while also dismissive of people having to creep into bathrooms to stay alive and in one case, literally flood their neighbour out (saving his life too).
Words gain more and more importance. Residents aren’t listened to as they reasonably raise issues about faulty designs, interior fittings, accessibility, the loss of green spaces to an academy and sports centre. Their pride in their area, their homes, their community, in being who they are is belittled. However, they fight back with more targeted words — in residents meetings, protests, emails. And their words form a legal witness and a condemnation to those who failed them.
I admit that I do feel sorry for the firefighters as they clearly tried to do their best, tried to protect life and risked their own — whilst clearly the stay put policy didn’t work because the cheaper materials cladding the block weren’t fireproof. They got out of their depth quickly on the ground. They also didn’t seem to have advanced support at the site soon enough, and there’s hindsight — the materials weren’t behaving as expected, because they channeled an inferno, rather than protecting surrounding families from fire spreading.
However I don’t want to offend survivors or anyone — systems (police and firefighters) failed these people, knowledge wasn’t shared quickly enough, the trust in the stay put policy killed rather than saving lives. Families with young children were put into impossible situations — plunging into choking black smoke to find their way out down dozens of stairs, having to manage protecting vulnerable young children and themselves with wet towels against boiling handrails. Overall many assumptions were made — based around materials, fire conducting properties, gender, ethnicity, dress, location, status, panic and anger being displayed, accent, about who the Grenfell community were. And these assumptions were fatally wrong.
Design too is an issue — in the ways functioning ordinary communities were being deliberately run down and deprived of resources to covered in cladding to push them out and hide them from view. Purely because they were council estates. There’s a whole story here of the way council estates are viewed and treated, local government mismanagement, the spiteful labelling of residents as ‘rebels’ purely because they ‘dared’ to speak out, to mobilise their community to assert their democratic right to have a boiler in a convenient place which allowed access to pushchairs, to not being bullied just because they were living in a council estate, of ordinary people not being seen or heard — and during the telephone calls to emergency services not being listened to, being dismissed. It’s heartbreakingly unjust. More widely in the poor layout of the firefighters control room where one TV screen is broken and another badly located behind a managerial desk so it can’t be seen by the rest of the team directly, so the news wasn’t on and firefighters in the room didn’t observe the scale and pace of the fire and use those visual clues to direct colleagues on the ground effectively.
Class, ethnicity, gender, accent all come together here — council estate residents are eligible for dodgy doors and poorly fitted windows, for flammable plastic surrounds — just because of where they live. And yet, listening to the Grenfell community speak here, they valued each other, where they lived, how they lived. It was (and is) something beautiful, because of the humanity of the community, and even how in the worst, many still tried to care for each other through warnings. Yet they were neither protected nor encouraged to flourish by those who should have protected them or promoted their flourishing. Harrowing is the portrayal of a man with a disability due to childhood Polio stumbling painfully down flights of stairs and no-one stopped to help him.
We never see the fire. Even so, through lighting, we see the stairs and being in something of the darkness. To hear the words is enough — you can’t imagine, and yet they went through it and survived to keep speaking out. They are Phoenixes. Even so a vibrant community was destroyed, life (including very young lives) shamelessly wasted, and those who should repent and act remaining heartlessly silent. (We join the inquest where the various building material manufacturers, researchers, scientists, engineers, marketeers have all suddenly forgotten their motivations and focus). Not only was it about an abandoning of protective regulations to make money at the expense of people’s lives, but further greed in a scramble for budget matching bids, and turning services and people’s homes into businesses and profit margins.
I’m aware that I’m writing in new knowledge — I knew it was a scandal, an injustice, like Windrush, but I didn’t really know. Now I know, I may write in ignorance of the full facts. I’ve tried not to, however I may have got some things wrong in expression, fact or tone and I would hate to do that, I don’t want to bring harm to those who have suffered so much already. I apologise sincerely if I have written in any error here. Indeed, I thank the people of Grenfell for letting me into their lives, to hear their voices and celebrate their courage in the face of so much adversity.
It is so moving to see people’s lives, hopes and dreams reduced to one smoke filled box of remnants. At the same time, these are tenderly redeemed within the play, doubling up as props to show the people before, who they were as well as who they are now. But they should have been safe, all people should be able to trust in the building materials surrounding them — especially if they’re provided by official authorities. And still no justice….
This also highlights the scale of it — people lost everything — family, friends, sentimental irreplicable items, their homes, their safe spaces. https://www.redcross.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/uk-emergency-response/london-fire-relief-fund/how-we-used-your-donations
