Scenes from the inquiry: tribunal theatre and the act of listening

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses approaches to listening when creating theatre using the words of real people via a recent tribunal play by Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent, Value Engineering: Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry (2021). The article considers the play in relation to transitional justice practices to reveal how listening functioned in its creation and development. It posits the repurposing of the terms ‘macro listening’ and ‘micro listening’ to distinguish between two particular forms that listening took on the project. The example of Value Engineering serves to demonstrate complex and multimodal approaches to listening when staging legal testimony.