Grenfell: Value Engineering – Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry has no right to work as drama. It’s simply edited extracts from the enquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire. It disobeys the first rule of playwriting: it doesn’t show, it tells. The director keeps his actors static – the judge in the centre, the counsel for the enquiry standing at his desk, the witnesses in the witness box: none of those moments beloved of American courtroom dramas when the lawyer prowls around the courtroom and looms over the wretched witness.

Theatre is not supposed to work this way. Yet this is one of the most compelling pieces of theatre you will ever see.

That’s partly because the subject matter is appalling, and still very close. Grenfell Tower in west London burned down on 14th June 2017 and 72 people met a dreadful death in the smoke-filled furnace-like tower block. Within days it was public knowledge that the 24-storey building had been covered in a highly flammable cladding. If it hadn’t been, none of this would have happened.

It’s also because the technical and unemotional dialogue and delivery serve to throw into sharp relief the appalling truth that the play illuminates: the building was covered with a cheap cladding, known to be potentially lethal, in order to save a couple of hundred thousand pounds. That’s the value our society puts on the lives of people without money or influence – because if you have either of those things, you don’t live in Grenfell Tower.

 A person who could walk out of the theatre and not feel unbearably angry would not be someone I could ever care about.