‘I was brought up among giants’: Gillian Slovo on her revolutionary parents – and her mother’s murder
As she takes the words of Grenfell Tower fire survivors to the New York stage, the playwright talks about being drawn to painful subjects, and the disaster’s worldwide relevance
The night I saw Grenfell, the play by Gillian Slovo based on interviews with survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire, there was a small but unprecedented response from the audience. On paper, Grenfell, which has transferred to New York after its successful run in London, is a tough sell to American theatregoers: the disaster wasn’t big news in the US and the play’s setting is peculiarly British. Towards the end of the play, however, when a survivor suggests the fire wasn’t caused by the system being broken but rather by the system performing exactly as built, the audience at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn broke into spontaneous applause. “We haven’t had that reaction before,” says Slovo.
The 72-year-old playwright and novelist is accustomed to chronicling failures in government and if the subject matter of Grenfell seemed, at first glance, more parochial than her verbatim plays about Guantánamo or Islamic State, it turned out to be deceptively so. The deaths in 2017 of 72 people in a west London tower block tell a universal story, not only about deregulation and corporate carelessness, but about double standards in government towards marginalised communities. Any American who can summon images of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina – people left to fend for themselves; people shot at by police as they fled, or camped out on sidewalks – can understand immediately and viscerally what this play is about.
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