The inquisitorial plays of Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent have altered the theatrical landscape – and changed minds. Most overtly political drama deals in opinions. Kent and Norton-Taylor deliver facts. Staging actual trials and tribunals, using words from transcripts, this least theatrical of theatre-making can discomfort in multiple ways: performances are so transparent it can be hard to know if an actor is struggling for breath or stumbling over forgotten words.
Grenfell: System Failure is the second reenactment of evidence from the public inquiry into the fire. (The first, Grenfell: Value Engineering, premiered in 2021.) Staged minutes away from the tower, it is an uncompromising evening. The setting is bland, corporate: a dark screen and light wood desks. The legal team are focused, unrhetorical: Thomas Wheatley’s chairman drills calmly into witness statements; as the QCs, Ron Cook is unimpressible, undeviating, Sally Giles exacting and exasperated. Much of the two and a half hours is made up of technical evidence about cladding and insulation. The detail mounts, numbingly: the dryness makes survivors’ accounts the more lacerating. Stumbling down the stairs in black smoke, a woman saw by the light of her son’s mobile phone that she was treading not on hosepipes but on hands.
Under questioning, Nick Hurd, minister of state for policing and the fire service, admits to being ashamed that “the system I was part of failed”. He is unusual. Most of those questioned shelter behind the idea that they were simply doing their job, and that each job was a discrete entity: “We spoke where we were invited to speak,” a Building Research Establishment official explains when asked whether industry had been alerted to the demonstrated combustibility of the cladding: architects had “nearly fainted” at the test results. Lord Pickles explains he is a Christian – as if that absolved him from active decision-making. The inertia is as shocking as the callous doltishness of the employees who adorned emails about previous fires with smiley-face emojis. Negligence – a form of stupidity – kills as certainly as malevolence. A government that trumpeted the need to cut “red tape” in order to create a sense of “dynamism” and enterprise actually produced lazy-minded, spineless placemen.
I’ve been arguing with colleagues who don’t admire Simon Stone’s tumultuous remaking of Phaedra, currently playing at the National theatre. One antagonist suggested it was tainted with misogyny since Phaedra herself was so impossible to like. I think the opposite: that to have a female central figure who is galvanically interesting rather than clearly sympathetic is a feminist advance. After all, no one thinks Hamlet’s appeal lies in his being a nice chap.
This raises the question of how to respond to Medea, who kills her children when betrayed by her husband. I think it impossible to make this explicable by argument. A programme note compares other more recent female revenges. But cutting up your husband’s shirts is not much of a comparison. Not only because Medea’s violence hurt people. Not only because those people were children. But because Medea simultaneously wounded herself. The success of the play depends on general plausibility being swamped by the strength of theatrical feeling.
I am never completely convinced, but Dominic Cooke’s impeccable production and Sophie Okonedo’s performance bring me close. Okonedo breathes fire from the beginning; you believe her when she casually mentions that her grandfather transacted with the god of the sun. Her elemental blazing makes it possible to believe she has no regard for an ordinary human life. Cooke uses Robinson Jeffers’s lean and swinging 1940s version of Euripides, which paints in a monochrome palette of bleached bone and darkness. Vicki Mortimer’s design is a stone circle with tunnelling stairs: Okonedo appears as if from the underworld and retreats downwards as if to hell.
By being scattered among the audience the chorus of three women seem to speak through us. The male parts are all taken with great dexterity by Ben Daniels: he is both a vehement Jason and a very funny camp Aegeus. Pacing around the action, moving sometimes in exaggerated slow motion, sometimes with furious speed, he becomes a male noose around the woman at the centre. That circularity is crucial: in establishing the marvellous @sohoplace Nica Burns was inspired by the amphitheatre at Epidaurus. Her own theatre is as encouraging as it is imposing: it cups the audience in the same space as the actors.
Butetown, the Cardiff dockland area more famous as Tiger Bay, is celebrated for its harmonies: for the voice of Shirley Bassey and the early easygoing mix of more than 50 nationalities. It is also notorious for some harsh miscarriages of justice apparently grounded on racism.
Diana Nneka Atuona draws on the place’s well-known qualities to make Trouble in Butetown, a warm-hearted, awkwardly paced play set in the second world war when American GIs, themselves subjected to a policy of segregating black and white soldiers, arrived in Cardiff. Tinuke Craig’s production has lively local moments.
Sarah Parish is formidable and pained as the matriarch of a cramped but welcoming lodging house, who is trying her hand at hooch-making. There are some truly enjoyable sisterly spats. The particular flavour of the area is fascinating. But the plot is overactive; the strongest episodes don’t have room to breathe. Like Peter McKintosh’s design and costumes, the play is all bunched up and raring to go.
Star ratings (out of five)
Grenfell: System Failure ★★★★
Medea ★★★★
Trouble in Butetown ★★★
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Grenfell: System Failure is at the Tabernacle, London from 27 February to 12 March, then at Marylebone theatre, London from 14 March to 26 March
