Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

I’ve never sat in such an uncomfortable and long silence at the end of a play, after a final poignant image. There was no curtain call, no applause, just silence. After what seemed like an age, the doors were opened, there was a ripple of nervous applause, and people began to move and talk. The power of theatre.

Richard Norton-Taylor and Nick Kent have presented similar ‘tribunal plays’, mostly at the then Tricycle Theatre – Bloody Sunday, Stephen Lawrence, Scott arms to Iraq, Hutton justifying war inquiries, and more – but I found this more harrowing, perhaps because it was current and I was sitting in a building near to the event it chronicles, but mostly because of the evidence I’d been presented with, distilled from days and days of testimony between November 2017 and March 2021 from a yet to be completed inquiry. Of course it is an edited selection, but I have no reason to believe it doesn’t faithfully represent what was heard in that inquiry.

We hear from fire officers, building inspectors, architects, building contractors, cladding manufacturers, property managers and expert witnesses, questioned by counsel and the inquiry chairman. These are played by thirteen actors, with five doubling up so well that you wouldn’t necessarily know unless you looked at the cast sheet. At times it becomes very technical, but you get the gist. The lack of competence and accountability of the parties, and the serial buck-passing, are devastating. Most extraordinary of all is that only the fire officers, building inspector and the most junior property manager seemed to show any remorse.

Everything you hear is verbatim from the inquiry. You can argue that editing can misrepresent, but I think we’d have heard those challenges by now. You could of course follow the inquiry in the media, but that could misrepresent too. it seems to me this is as or more likely to be objective, and it is certainly more educational and insightful when you concentrate on it for a couple of hours like this. Theatre has an important role in illuminating issues in this way, and this is both urgent and important theatre.