108. Grenfell: The Play Shining a Light on the Truth - With Co-Writer and Director Nicolas Kent and Anthony Biggs of the Playground Theatre

Break Out Culture With Ed Vaizey by Country and Town House

On this week’s episode we’re celebrating the power of ‘activist culture’ and the critically acclaimed play, ‘Grenfell: System Failure’. The play follows on from ‘Grenfell: Value Engineering’ and is based entirely on the words of those involved in last year’s final phase of the Inquiry into the tragic and avoidable fire that killed 72 people.

The play has been performed at The Playground Theatre and The Tabernacle, both almost within a stone’s throw of Grenfell Tower, and is now at the new Marylebone Theatre for a final week. To discuss it with us are Anthony Biggs, Artistic Director at The Playground Theatre, and Nicolas Kent, who directed the play and co-edited the transcripts with Richard Norton-Taylor.

This is a brilliantly illuminating play on a tragic, complex subject and a superb example of how culture at its best can make sense of a mass of data, allowing audiences to access the most significant evidence and make their own minds up as to how this terrible fire happened. Every single word is taken from the enquiry and the reality is undoubtedly as shocking than anything anyone could make up. It’s a dramatic often hard-to-believe account of heinous buck-passing and systematic failure, which meant numerous urgent safety warnings were simply brushed aside or ignored. Tune in to hear how this play has moved the dial in terms of public and private responses to this lamentable tragedy.