When Pearl Mackie’s agent sent her the script for , she knew she had to do it.
The play recounts , the 2017 west-London council block fire in which , using the words of former residents, compiled from interviews by writer Gillian Slovo. Interspersed with this account are scenes from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, the report from which is still unpublished.
Among other things, it sought to establish how the authorities allowed the block to be.
‘Even now six years later, no one’s been held accountable and I just think that’s absolutely appalling,’ says Pearl, best known for her role as companion Bill Potts.
She plays manager , one of the last people to be rescued.
‘So to be given the opportunity to be part of something about Grenfell… it’s too important to pass up.’
It is an astonishing piece of work, as profoundly essential as it is viscerally harrowing.
What’s remarkable is the level of detail it offers, forensically cataloguing the chain of mismanagement that led to the catastrophe. Pearl says it has been a remarkable eye-opener.
‘I thought I knew quite a lot,’ she says. ‘I consider myself quite aware politically and I grew up in a council estate myself.
‘But reading the script I was shocked at how little I knew actually – at how many systems had failed these people. Maybe it’s not even that – it’s that the systems were built to fail.’
Pearl says she doesn’t even really see what they are doing as a play, more a piece of activism.
‘We’re playing survivors and we are telling their words directly to the audience,’ she says. ‘But also saying that this story affects us and affects you, and essentially just trying to build a community to fight for justice. I think that’s what we’re trying to do, and I hope we manage to.’
In conversation, Pearl has exactly the kind of down-to-earth honesty that made Bill a delight – and meant that although she only stuck around for one season, she is fondly recalled by Doctor Who fans as a favourite companion. What’s notable is that Bill was the Time Lord’s first openly gay companion – something Pearl clearly is immensely proud of.
‘The fact that she has been part of people’s journeys to accepting themselves as queer – I can’t put into words how incredible that is,’ says Pearl, who came out publicly as bisexual via Instagram in the summer of 2020.
‘It was just after and I was going through so much in regard to that and going through my history and looking at so many past experiences and questioning everything,’ she says.
‘It just felt like I was being so honest with myself about everything else, that I thought “This is not something I want to keep from anyone anymore”.’
She’ll be getting married to her fiancé, Kam, next year and recently presented a segment on The One Show reflecting on ten years of .
She has also been in two very different TV shows – glossy Netflix political thriller The Diplomat and ITV’s refreshing take on rollicking 18th-century novel Tom Jones, which recast heroine Sophia Western as a mixed-race woman, who was the daughter of a slave owner and enslaved woman. Pearl plays her maid, Honour.
Pearl admired Gwyneth Hughes’s adaptation for the way it looked at Britain’s colonial past – although she notes that the racism Sophia and Honour encounter still feels ‘realistic to some of the experiences that we as people of colour have in parts of the country today’.
Racism rears its head in Grenfell: In The Words Of Survivors, among other themes.
When I ask Pearl about her plans, it’s no surprise that her focus is all on this job: one too momentous to be distracted by other things. ‘It’s tough,’ she says, ‘but it’s necessary, and so important, and honestly I just feel really honoured to be part of the story and to be able to tell these stories the way they should be told.’
Grenfell: In The Words Of Survivors is at London’s National Theatre until Aug 26, tickets can be bought: .
