Tragedy a ‘glitch’ or ‘product’ of the system?

A premise in the introduction to an interview with the author and playwright Gillian Slovo in The Guardian struck me. Attending the American production of the play "Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors," the journalist Emma Brockes noted that she thought the story of a fire in an apartment block in London in 2017, which killed 72 people, would be a "tough sell to American theatergoers." Then she added: "Towards the end of the play, however, when a survivor suggests the fire wasn't caused by the system being broken but rather by the system performing exactly as built, the audience at St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn broke into spontaneous applause."

Clearly, the death of Grenfell Tower's residents can touch people everywhere, as it is the result of deregulation, the recklessness of corporate enterprises and the lack of interest that governments show in communities of the less...