content warning: violent death

In the early hours of June 14th 2017, when the 24-storey Grenfell Tower was on fire in North Kensington, I was asleep on the very top floor of a tower block on the opposite side of London. I was down visiting a friend, and while we had slept, 70 people were killed in the fire. Two more would die in hospital, and the 73rd would die a few months later. I felt something like vertigo reading the news that morning. I remember looking out the windows at the London below us. Clear sky, sunny day. I’ve been to so many funerals in hot weather. And I looked out of the top of the tower expecting to see Grenfell on the horizon, to meet it face to face. But to my relief, we were just too far away.

I am thinking of that now — the tragedy and me, and the distance between us — because I recently watched ‘Grenfell: in the words of survivors’ on the National Theatre’s streaming service. By the time the play ended, all of that imagined distance had collapsed. Recorded during the two week run at the Dorfman Theatre in 2023, this is a verbatim play. The script is made up of new interviews with Grenfell’s residents, as well as words taken from the public record: emails, contracts, blog posts, diagrams, and testimonies that constituted the public inquiry. Playwright Gillian Slovo’s job was not one of writing but of gathering and ordering and focusing all of that material in order to amplify other people’s voices. There’s no fiction, no embellishment. The horror of the Grenfell tragedy is enough, and this is a kind of resurrection.

I was distraught when it finished, even at home here in Liverpool, years after the fact. Covered in tears, feeling loud and done. I don’t remember the last time I’ve had a reaction like this to art, especially one with so little artifice. It’s partly a reaction to history, of course, but even that’s only possible because the script, the direction, and the cast’s realism, clear a space in time so that audiences can feel the weight of exactly what went on.

The play opens with each actor naming the resident they are representing, the flat that person used to live in, and which floor they ultimately had to escape from. It then forensically lays out a timeline that begins in 1666: ‘After the Great Fire of London, they made a rule that you can’t use combustible materials on the outside of buildings.’ It takes us to Margaret Thatcher loosening building regulations in the 1980s; to David Cameron loosening things even more in 2010 to encourage more business. We hear about the managed decline of Grenfell, as well as the developers who wanted to spruce the tower up for the sake of the property value in the area. We then follow the actions of American company Arconic, who covered Grenfell in a cheap flammable cladding that would never pass the safety regulations set by other countries. The company spends less so that they keep more; how English of them. And the play tracks and maps every detail until the timeline marches us to June 14th, when a fire that broke out on the 4th floor should have been contained by the architecture but instead, Arconic’s cheap cladding acted like a chimney that carried the flames right around the entire building.

It is a timeline that argues the Grenfell tragedy was inevitable, needless, and also a crude matter of business for some. Writing it out like this feels like another matter of business. I am flattening the impact of these decisions made by powerful people. The play, on the other hand, shows exactly what that meant for the residents. Its story is like two strong hands pushing against the shoulders of a small mortal body. The story pushes the body further and further back, with a frothing mouth and empty eyes and force and all of this meticulous greed. And we watch that body as it starts to fall, and then it’s in midair, and then it’s on the floor. The play is performed with such a momentum that it time-travels the audience towards this burgeoning death. It’s hard to bear. Hard when residents describe tripping over bodies in the dark; when they describe trying to wet towels but there’s no water pressure. Hard when call centre operators give them different advice based on their accent. Harder still when people finally make it outside only to see riot police as if they’ve done something wrong. Hard, impossible, scarring when one man recounts pushing against a wall that he knows is not a door, but he keeps pushing the wall because he can’t see anything, and he needs to get out, to get through.

The scale of the public horror pushes us right back in our seats. The performance of these more personal horrors beckons us to lean in. And there’s a responsibility there. To lean in, to be close, to listen to every one of these words — even if we hear about what’s going on, look out the window and think oh yes, that’s terrible, but it’s happening so far away.

Last year, two people died about 100 metres away from where I live. I was thinking about them in the silence after the play. To be honest, I think about them quite often.

Queens Drive is a long, incomplete ring road that curves through Liverpool’s suburbs. It dips under a railway track at one point, and then climbs back up, coming to an end at an old Victorian park. Last August, it rained heavily one night. I remember it well because our landlord isn’t arsed about fixing the gutters, and a loud noise was battering the back of the house for hours. I remember the next morning too. My boyfriend was in work and I’d offered to get something for him from the shop down the road but when I tried to cross the bridge — the one over Queens Drive, running parallel to the railway — I was stopped by police tape. I followed the new perimeter around and down to the road below where the story became obvious. Five police cars in a barricade; one van between them from the local water company, United Utilities. A group of men stood with their arms folded. Behind all of this, an odd sight for what is normally a busy road. A lone car, side-on across the lanes, completely wrapped in blue tarpaulin. Wrapped like you might do if you wanted to keep something safe. Wrapped like you might do at a crime scene if somebody inside a vehicle had died.

I felt that vertigo again, like I had from the top of the tower watching videos of Grenfell bleeding black smoke. Something to do with wanting to be beyond all of this, to be above the city line and in the sky, and not on the ground where humans die; something opposite, about feeling so impossibly small and vulnerable while giants stamp over my head. This dip under the bridge is the lowest point in the area and it floods all the time. The drainage becomes overwhelmed almost instantly and the basin becomes a trap that only locals know to avoid, because we’re the only ones who know just how deep the road beneath the water goes.

Local news already had it: the night before, 75 year old Elaine and 77 year old Philip Marco had driven into what must have looked like a puddle to them. They had drowned inside their car. They were Jewish caterers, a week away from celebrating their 54th wedding anniversary. The local Facebook group was seething. People had been complaining to the council about the risk for decades. The drainage. The bad lighting. The fact the road stays open even when flooding can completely disappear a car, and two lives, and a business, and 54 years of marriage. Someone on the Facebook group commented about how they can put men on the moon, but they can’t fix this one drain because they don’t want to spend the money on it. Must be cheaper in the long run to let people die. Yeah, to die on the drive home because that water only looks like a puddle. To die of smoke inhalation in your home because the fire brigade knows there’s a problem, yet they are telling everyone to stay put.

I was mindless in 2017. I was 22 and seeing Grenfell on the news but just going about my day. I don’t know if it is age, or exposure. Gaza, kids in pieces, body parts hanging over fences. Trump back in office. Floods lashing lorries against houses in Valencia and sweeping families away. Elaine and Philip Marco on my mind every time I walk over the bridge. Or the fact I’m still with the Long Covid clinic coming up on 4 years since I got sick. I don’t know exactly. It just feels cumulative, and like things are increasingly closing in. In the play, one resident says ‘And now, I expect a fire to happen wherever I am. That’s the truth.’ The problems happening to other people in far away places are here even when they’re not. Whether it happens through fire or water or disease or war, I reckon that fear will always be in me now so long as money is worth more than any one stranger’s life.

-> watch it here (it says limited time only, so be quick maybe)