On billboards in the underground at Waterloo, Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors, a keenly awaited show at the National, advertises itself as “a new play” by Gillian Slovo. But the drama itself is not new at all: this has been an uncontainable and continuing tragedy. Six years after the fire that killed 72 people on 14 June 2017 in the 24-storey residential tower in North Kensington, the inquiry has yet to publish its findings and construction companies have yet to be prosecuted for criminal liability. It is a catastrophe that remains scandalously unresolved, the inquiry’s conclusions not now expected until 2024.
There have been multiple responses to Grenfell from journalists and artists – Steve McQueen’s film Grenfell, Richard Norton-Taylor’s verbatim pieces Grenfell: Value Engineering and Grenfell: System Failure about the hearing and, as early as 2018, Andrew O’Hagan’s controversial essay in the London Review of Books that led to the question: who has the right to tell this story? Here is the sense in which Slovo’s play is new and important. It is not only that she uses the words of survivors; it’s that they are her collaborators. They were invited to read transcripts, take part in the film that ends the show, be their own editors. The result is an inquiry of the best sort – the most humane kind – on stage.
It is an engulfing experience, directed with ambitious simplicity by Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike. At just over three hours, it makes space for everyone to be heard, which feels generous and right. On a bare stage there are only 10 packing crates (designer Georgia Lowe), as if to remind you of all the possessions lost in the fire. The evening is divided into three parts. In the first, the excellent cast – each actor a spokesperson for a survivor – tells us about the day before the fire: a picnic, a visit to Argos, a clamped car. Normality is sickeningly overcast by knowing what is to come.
The second part is an account of the fire itself. It is harrowing but not sensational. There are no images, but words prove more than capable of doing the terrible work of that night, recreating a horror to which the audience will relate, each of us imagining the stairs, the black smoke, the uncertainty about whether and how to get out. You get to feel attached to everyone involved – I was particularly disarmed by the testimony of Antonio Roncolato, the Italian hotel worker who puts his son’s swimming goggles on for protection and who observes a bottle of wine that pops open of its own accord in the heat. He says: “It was like hell, you know what I mean?”
But here is the question: why descend again into hell? Why revisit Grenfell? The answer is about community – and justice. This is true in an official context (what might the emergency services learn about how to operate more fairly and without racism?), but it is also an examination of what communal responsibility means at the deepest level – extending beyond Grenfell and into the audience – and it is this that makes the evening so moving. For this unconventional piece of theatre boldly doubles as activism. The third part is a short and uncompromising film in which survivors address us in person, urging us to take on their cause and call for justice. It is great that the National Theatre is staging this – and that it is also involved in a long-term collaborative project with the west London community. Slovo has spent five years collecting this material. As the daughter of anti-apartheid activists, she is, clearly, made of comparable stuff.
Four women from the same family – a grandmother, her two grownup daughters and teenage granddaughter – are at home in Birkenhead, staring at their phones. Gormlessly separate, each is fixated by the small, illuminated oblong in her hand. Sarah, a primary school teacher, suggests: “Shall we just put them down for a minute?” But once the dopamine has drained away, they seem to have lost the knack of family conversation, stumped by their own company. Michael Wynne’s smart new comedy Cuckoo examines our modern focus and the ways in which we have gone astray. He considers how technology has brought us closer to one another and created distance. He impressively pulls off the feat of writing a laugh-aloud play without undermining the subject of a world in crisis.
The younger you are, the more likely to be terrified. Doreen, the gran, is played by Sue Jenkins as a fluffily merry soul, unburdened by worries about “environmental nonsense”. For her, the internet is an uncomplicated blessing. She gets her kicks selling on eBay and has acquired a new man “on my iPad” who assures her the climate crisis is a hoax. The daughters suffer variously the tribulations of middle age. Sarah is beautifully played by Jodie McNee as brittle, funny and flourishing – until she isn’t. Michelle Butterly is sympathetically convincing as Carmel, a stressed-out single mum with a good heart, barely holding it together on a zero-hours contract at Boots while looking after her problem teenager, Megyn.
The latter is a problem because the world is a problem. She locks herself into her grandmother’s bedroom, texting her gran for room service. Emma Harrison is appropriately and alarmingly dysfunctional in the role. Vicky Featherstone’s production is hilarious, troubling and soberingly relatable. The frumpy house is nicely rendered by designer Peter McKintosh. It’s a play that is shapely in its craftsmanship. Put your mobile on silent and see it.
If The Sound of Music is one of your favourite things, this meticulous homage to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical should please. But if you were pining to be re-immersed in the 1965 Julie Andrews film, with its mountain heights and delicious, bordering-on-absurd sense of nature as a free-for-all, you may feel that this nostalgia-fest, respectfully directed by Adam Penfold, is missing something. Designer Robert Jones defeatedly acknowledges in a programme essay that it is impossible to put a landscape on stage, and his design lacks alpine thrills. What we have is a plausible abbey alternating with a custard-coloured Salzburg salon in which the Von Trapps hang out. Above are abstract smears of mountain and sky.
As Maria, Gina Beck is all you could ask for: sweetness and light, paddling about barefoot, approaching her prayers with appetite. It suddenly occurred to me, Maria would make a tremendous ADHD heroine. She is gloriously impulsive – even if all the yodelling after bedtime is exhausting. She is fearlessly outspoken, explaining to her boss how he has gone wrong as a parent. As Captain Von Trapp, Edward Harrison responds with fine-voiced gravity. Janis Kelly, as the Mother Abbess, amusingly conveys her wish to live – and love – vicariously.
The Sound of Music is a multi-tiered escape: Maria flees the abbey, Von Trapp overcomes his nastiness, the children – all charmingly played – cut loose from paternal oppression and everyone, in the sober denouement, escapes the Nazis by toiling up the mountains to freedom. And we, for an hour or three escape, agreeably, alongside them.
Star ratings (out of five)
Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors ★★★★★
Cuckoo ★★★★
The Sound of Music ★★★
