Staging Grenfell: The Ethics of Representing Housing Crises in London

Abstract:This article explores the ethical complexity of Value Engineering: Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry (which opened in October 2021), a documentary ‘tribunal’ play that presents elements of the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower tragedy—a fire in a social housing block in London, England, in June 2017 in which seventy-two people died. Locating the performance within a cultural and political landscape of deadly class inequity fostered by neo-liberal policies, this article responds to criticism of the play from working-class artists who felt it was made and presented without due consideration for the communities impacted by the tragedy. The article asks what ethical issues were at stake in the representation, and parses some of these to consider how and whether ethically compromised work might nonetheless offer worthwhile interventions into the public conversation surrounding Grenfell, class injustice, and neo-liberal failure.