The New Yorker:

The survivors of the deadly 2017 London fire speak in a theatre piece opening at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

By Rebecca Mead

Hanan Wahabi, who is forty-six and works as a special-ed coördinator, was born in St. Mary’s Hospital in West London and grew up less than two miles away, on Portobello Road, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. She attended local schools, married at twenty-one, and became a mother at twenty-two. The next year, she was delighted to secure an apartment on the ninth floor of a nearby public-housing tower block; her brother Abdulaziz lived with his wife and three children on the twenty-first floor. On June 14, 2017, a fire broke out on the fourth floor shortly before 1 a.m. Residents were advised to stay in place, but Hanan’s sixteen-year-old son insisted on taking his eight-year-old sister downstairs and urged his parents to escape. They watched in horror from the street as the fire engulfed the building. The advice to stay put changed shortly before 3 a.m., by which time it was too late for Abdulaziz and his family. They were among the seventy-two residents of Grenfell Tower who died as a result of the fire.

One recent afternoon, Wahabi took a walk in the neighborhood with Gillian Slovo, a novelist and playwright whose verbatim drama “Grenfell: in the words of survivors,” which premièred at the National Theatre in London last year, comes this month to St. Ann’s Warehouse. Wahabi is one of nine former residents of the tower whose words—which are drawn from interviews with Slovo and from the official inquiry into the disaster—have been woven together in what the Guardian called “a masterpiece of forensic fury.” Also included are damning testimonials given at the inquiry by employees of Arconic, Celotex, and Kingspan, the companies that manufactured the highly flammable cladding and insulation that the inquiry has said allowed the fire to spread so rapidly, and footage of the former Prime Minister David Cameron announcing a reduction in red tape around building regulations. The second part of the inquiry’s report will be published this summer; so far, no one has faced criminal charges. “People should be jailed for what they did, and what they didn’t do,” Slovo said.

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