Value Engineering

Value Engineering is the latest in the ‘tribunal plays’ that Nicolas Kent pioneered at the Tricycle in the 1990s. Tribunal plays are plays whose source material generally comes from a public enquiry (from which most of the public has no direct access). At their best they correct the deficits that blight our democracy; they reveal the vulnerabilities of power; and, in their stately way, they can be massively rousing, shocking, and devastating.

This play draws on the public enquiry into the terrible night of 14 June 2017, when a small fire spread across the exterior of Grenfell Tower in West London, killing 72 and injuring 70 more, most of them Black and Global Majority residents, most of them very poor, many of whom had complained about safety standards in the tower for years.

The show is, quite rightly, harrowing and devastating. The most emotional material happens early on as we learn the story of a fire fighter who took upon himself the task of rescuing a 13-year-old boy, thought to be on the nineteenth floor. His attempt is hindered first by the fact that the boy has taken refuge two floors above, but then also that the upper floors are unexpectedly filling with thick black smoke. So consumed was he by the task of this singular rescue, he does not think to alert other residents to their peril. The firefighter breaks down on the witness stand as he faces the fact that if he had simply knocked on a door, he might have saved lives.

Then we get into the intricacies of the relations between the architects, the Tenants Management Organisation, the contractor, the subcontractor, the manufacturer of the cladding, and the Building Control Surveyor, all of whom pass the buck for the fire. A plan had been hatched to renovate Grenfell Tower and the architects submitted a design that underwent a process of ‘value engineered’ (i.e. cost-cutting). Most crucially, a series of zinc panels were replaced by aluminium panels filled with polyethylene (a highly flammable substance). As such, when a small kitchen fire in a 4th floor flat spread through the window, the exterior panels ignited and the fire quickly spread on the outside of the building, reaching the very top in about half an hour. Most of the witnesses claim that it was not their job to check the fire-retardant properties of the cladding and most of them don’t seem to have seen the need to check that the panels they were fixing complied with building regulations, which themselves seem to be confusing and hard to understand.

The crisp, formal business of the enquiry creates a patina of mostly rational, unemotional calm, which makes the reports we get of that night all the more horrifying. The many deaths and the real human suffering of smoke inhalation, the fear, the horror, emerge as a kind of subtext. The visual blandness of the enquiry room - a large blue wall, three teak desks, microphones, men and women in formalwear with lanyards and ring binders is replaced in our minds with the terror of the burning building. Only once, early on, do we see any images of Grenfell on fire, a short sequence to show evidence of the polyethylene having liquefied and dropping thick hot sparks onto the ground below, while also feeding the fire above.

The actors beautifully underplay and give us glimpses of telling evasiveness, arrogance, bland abdications of responsibility, contradiction and more. The emotions of the first half hour are replaced by a furious anger that no one is prepared to accept responsibility. At one point a senior member of the TMO expresses confidence that he did a good job because the work was completed on budget, which gets an unusually waspish rebuttal from the examining QC: ‘if I may say so, the fact that the project was delivered on budget is not of great assistance to us, given that we know what happened to the building’ (p.90).

The Arts Desk review describes it as ‘bruising, necessary theatre’ which makes it sound like physiotherapy and, yes, it is a painful experience, particularly when we are reminded that this horrific mass death happened ‘within a pocket of one of the smallest yet richest boroughs in London, one of the richest cities in Europe, and one of the richest cities in the world’ (p.41). I felt a sense of shame and collective responsibility. The show is, deliberately of course, being performed less than a mile from the Tower. We are almost literally in its shadow.

So you should see it. I found it powerful, chastening, beautifully acted, serious and compelling. Which should be enough for anyone.

But… there are things that nagged at me during the performance, things that troubled me about the experience. I felt at times strong-armed, as if the obvious moral importance of the events of 14 June 2017 were being deployed impatiently to override any doubts or questions I might have. As if the undeniable real-world seriousness of the events discussed should disqualify us from wanting more.

(Am I being picky? There’s a lovely joke in a Frasier episode (‘Retirement is Murder’). Frasier and Niles return from dining together in a new restaurant. ‘How was dinner’ asks Daphne. ‘Fine,’ replies Niles, ‘except for one small flaw’. ‘Oh good,’ says Daphne, ‘just the way you like it’. And I’m aware that finding tiny flaws in otherwise superb theatre shows might be a vice of mine…)

But here’s the thing. There is a substantial section in the first half that focuses on the evidence of the architect, Bruce Sounes, of the design firm Studio E. An edit of his testimony is prefaced by an edit of a statement by a legal representative of the bereaved survivors, Stephanie Barwise. She notes that the aluminium cladding marked ‘an obsession with aesthetics, which was to dog the project’ (p.23). The idea, clearly stated, is that Studio E had recently had been commissioned to construct the nearby Kensington Academy and Leisure Centre and had come to think that the brutalist appearance of the Grenfell Tower was enough of an eyesore to damage the viability of the Leisure Centre. Therefore, ‘over-cladding Grenfell was seen as a solution to RBKC and others' aesthetic concerns’ (p.23). Placing aluminium panels around the Tower was, therefore, about prettying up a piece of council housing not for its residents but for those more well-heeled visitors who might have to glance at it.

There are several respects in which this is a distortion of what Barwise says. It is true that she uses those words in her statement (see the official transcript, 3:22-23, 4:6-7). But in the truncation of her statement - from, let’s be clear, around 50,000 words to around 750 words - the suggestions of aestheticism take on a far more prominent role. In her statement, not included in the edit, it becomes clear that the cladding was also put in place to improve the heat insulation of the building which was currently poor (2:25) and which the cladding was designed to improve (an aim described as ‘laudable’ and ‘admirable’ 5:9,22). Of course, the cladding eventually chosen was wholly inappropriate and the process of choosing it clearly negligent. But is it right to say that this was entirely driven by ‘aesthetics’? Well, it seems not, because initially zinc panels were chosen, which apparently would have provided far better protection against fire, but it was the ‘value engineering’ of the title that saw the contractor, pressured by the TMO, offer a saving of £243k by swapping the zinc panels for the aluminium panels (7:20). The zinc and aluminium panels were visually very similar; the difference, it seems, was the highly flammable polyethylene core of the latter and was driven , in other words, not by aesthetics, but economics. As Barwise puts it: ‘The change from zinc to ACM was an important instance in this case of the obsession with cost , not so much choosing cheaper materials known to be unsafe, but a concentration on cost at the expense of all else’ (104:8-11 my emphasis). So while the architects may have had a focus on aesthetics, the final cause of the choice of those fatal panels was economic. But you would not know that from the edit of Barwise’s statement which seems to assign blame to the architects’ ‘obsession with aesthetics’.

Why pick on this small detail? I understand, of course, that turning the millions of words produced by months and months of the enquiry into a 2½-hour theatre show will inevitably mean some shifts of emphasis, the foregrounding of some material over others. This is how good analytical work proceeds, cutting through the mass of information to see the clear outlines. But it does expose what choices the editor, Richard Norton-Taylor, has made and possibly the subliminal assumptions that may have guided that choice.

Because as I watched the show, I was struck by the show’s apparent obsession with aesthetic impoverishment. Pale teak furniture, men in dull suits, powerpoint slides. This seemed to be a vision of theatre that says aesthetic pleasure is inappropriate when considering serious matters of public moment. And certainly the type of theatre in which Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor have specialised evinces a naive realism that says the facts should be presented unadorned, certainly not turned into something pleasurable or entertaining. Discussions of serious public policy should be bruising and necessary and nothing more. In a sense, the approach of this kind of show is to strip away the aesthetic cladding to reveal the brutalism of the simple, damning truth.

But where this attitude to theatre falls down is that we know brutalism to be very much an aesthetic choice, a certain kind of adornment, a visual attitude to what urban architecture might be, a deliberate exposure of form (the rough concrete surfaces) and of function (exposed ventilation ducts and so on); these may have come clad in moral rectitude (that this was more ‘honest’ architecture) but these things date and we can see that the preference for exposed form and function was an artistic vision first of all.

Because, let’s be clear, it is preposterously puritanical to criticise an architect for thinking aesthetically, as if there were a way of designing a building that had no visual appearance or that council buildings must be purely functional. If my analysis of Stephanie Barwise’s testimony is right and aesthetics played very little role in the specific choice of a flammable material, then criticising aesthetics is actually a kind of mise en abyme where the debate about cladding on the Grenfell Tower is actually a playing out of certain anxieties about the nature of the Tribunal Play.

The Tribunal Play, after all, is also an expression of aesthetic preferences and choices. The testimony from the enquiry has been selected and reordered, with certain images and ideas (‘aesthetics’) turned into leitmotifs. The suppression of rhetorical or performative flamboyance is itself an aesthetic choice; it is what Roland Barthes, in a 1968 essay calls ‘The Reality Effect’. He notes how certain realist novelists use an excess of tiny inconsequential details to give the impression of realism. He suggests this works because of the very excess and pointlessness of those details; they serve no particular symbolic or narrative purpose, and so sit inertly as a token of reality by virtue of their apparent artlessness - or, we might say, their apparent refusal of aesthetics. There are quite a few of these reality effects in Value Engineering: when a witness falters in their answer, as when Ben Bailey is asked about his role: ‘Erm... (Pause.) I don't think my role is a technical role in terms of being able to agree - or, sorry, specifically discuss these things with John Hoban, but I could probably facilitate that discussion - erm’ (p. 50) or moments where Sir Martin Moore-Bick the chair of the enquiry asks someone to make themselves comfortable, or the fastidious slides that tell us there was a lunch break between two parts of a testimony. These do not appreciably contribute to the story being told (I never found it significant that a witness had experienced a lunch break between paragraphs), but they are there, I would suggest, to give the impression of reality. They are aesthetic techniques that imply an absence of aesthetics.

As we have seen with the discussion of aesthetics in the architects’ decision-making, this risks presenting a particular interpretation of reality as if it were transparent reality. And there are more concerns I had as the show went on - much though, let me say, I admired and was shocked and enraged by what the show exposed.

In the reduction from the great mass of evidence - with hundreds of witnesses, over many months, involving many thousands of documents - to the performance one particular thing seems to have happened, which is a troubling individualising of blame. As I’ve said, the show comes to focus on the relations between the various decision-makers who, between them, chose the lethal Arconic Reynobond PE cladding. It is instructive, exasperating and, if it were not so tragic, would almost be funny to see each of these men and women serially declare that they did not see their role to check the technical specification of the cladding or whether it conformed to building regulations. These figures seem sometimes to be woefully out of their depth, sometimes infuriatingly complacent, occasionally even mendaciously attempting to cover their back.

Inadvertently, though, I found myself - despite myself - feeling some sympathy for these people. They were plainly overworked, most of them were working in contexts where money and time was tight. It is clear that the UK building regulations are both less exacting than those in the EU and much more confusing. Although of course I wish it weren’t so, it does not seem surprising to me that in these circumstances, a chain of decision-makers will think or hope that someone else somewhere else is making the right decision. When one witness notes that he accepted the manufacturer’s estimate of their own product on trust because why would they lie, the audience laughed, but this seems to me simplistically to underestimate the enormous force when the economic pressures are telling you to do one thing and everyone else around you seems to think this is the right thing to do, and there seems no easily available way of checking whether it is the right thing to do. Trust is an essential component for all of us in our daily dealings and there should be structures in place to ensure that companies and stakeholders deserve that trust, not the voluntaristic actions of pressed individuals. After all, I found myself thinking, here I am, taking Richard Norton-Taylor’s material on trust; would he, I wondered, think me absurdly negligent to do so?

This is not to excuse the individuals involved in the Grenfell decision making, but it is to raise a question about whether individuals - and these individuals - should be the target of our anger. Although there were higher ranking political figures who gave evidence at the enquiry, none of them are represented in the show. (The Tribunal Plays have a bit of form in this respect: when they made Justifying War in 2003, a redux of the Hutton Enquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly and, through that, the reasons behind the Iraq War, the decision was made not include Tony Blair’s testimony because too much attention would be paid to him, unbalancing the careful presentation of the evidence in favour of a focus on a divisive personality.) This, again, aesthetic decision has the unfortunate impact of laying blame on people fairly low down in the food chain of these decisions and renders opaque the structural forces at work. It seems to me not irrelevant that these local government decisions took place at the height of Austerity economics and during the era of the ‘hostile environment’ which moved public sentiment against migrants (even second- or third-generation migrants). Reducing the focus to these few individuals runs the risk, it seems to me, of offering up scapegoats and missing the structural racism, the incompetent regulatory framework, and the overwhelming economic imperatives that contributed to these horrific deaths.

And this leads me to my final concern about the performance. When the casting was first announced, there was some outrage that in a show about an event that led to so many Black and Global Majority deaths (85% of those who died that night, the play tells us [p.42]), the cast was almost entirely white. I did not wholly join in those concerns: if you know what the Tribunal Play method is, you know that it is trying to reflect - in a documentary way - the events of an enquiry or trial. If there was a preponderance of white people at the enquiry, arguably that is the fault of the enquiry not the play.

But as I watched, I became uncomfortable with the optics of the performance. As I said earlier, the relative visual impoverishment of the performance means that the stories about what happened to the residents of Grenfell Tower on that night emerge horrifyingly through the gaps and hesitations and moments of break down in the witnesses’ testimony. The main QC leading the questioning,. Richard Millett QC (beautifully embodied by Ron Cook), provides a focus for our anger in his rare moments of impatience with the self-serving evasions of his witnesses. But is this a kind of middle-class white saviourism? We watch largely working-class white men and women being roasted over the coals by a highly educated white man (and his highly-educated white assistant), presided over genially by the retired white judge (played elegantly by Tribunal play veteran Thomas Wheatley).

I found myself wondering if there is a risk here of ‘white cladding’, a kind of theatrical gentrification of the Grenfell story, where the urban brutalism of what happened that night is prettified in a redemptive story of journalistic and legalistic penetration, while the real lives and the real deaths of those who died is allowed only to emerge as subtext.