Wasted
Wasted
Kate Tempest was born in London in 1985. Her work includes the plays Wasted, Glasshouse and Hopelessly Devoted; the poetry collections Everything Speaks in its Own Way and Hold Your Own; the albums Everybody Down, Balance, Let Them Eat Chaos and The Book of Traps and Lessons; the long poems Brand New Ancients and Let Them Eat Chaos; and her debut novel, The Bricks that Built the Houses.
Katie Beswick is a lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter, UK. She has published widely on theatre and council estates in journals including Research in Drama Education, Performance Research and New Theatre Quarterly, and her monograph Social Housing in Performance was published by Methuen Drama in 2019.
Wasted
KATE TEMPEST
With commentary and notes by
KATIE BESWICK
Series Editors: Sara Freeman, and Jenny Stevens, Matthew Nichols Chris Megson
Contents
Chronology and Significant Historical Events
Context: History, Society, Politics
Form and Genre
Hip hop
Verse drama
Realism/naturalism
Themes
Loss
Neoliberalism
Youth culture
First Production
Further Exploration
Works by Kate Tempest
On Kate Tempest
On hip hop
On realism/naturalism
On gentrification
Notes
Wasted
Chronology and Significant Historical Events
The timeline below maps an account of national and world events that surround the first performance of Wasted. As we will see in the CONTEXT section of this introduction, these seemingly unrelated events converge in the play in a variety of ways.
| 1973 | 11 August: Hip hop culture officially begins when teenager Clive Campbell performs as ‘DJ Kool Herc’ at a back-to-school party, thrown by his sister Cindy, in the recreation rooms at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, an apartment complex in the Bronx, New York. Using two turntables to play the same record, he innovates with a technique he has perfected over the preceding months, creating extended instrumental breaks so that partygoers can dance for longer. According to hip hop legend, his friend, Coke La Rock, hypes up the crowd by rhyming over instrumentals. Three of the four ‘pillars’ or ‘elements’ of hip hop culture: DJing, MCing (rhyming over music) and break-dancing (dancing in the instrumental breaks of song) are in action that evening. The fourth pillar of hip hop, graffiti, emerges around the same period. During the 1970s, graffiti, often in the form of ‘tags’ (marks indicating the creator), is seen across public spaces in inner city New York. Often it covers the interior and exterior of subway cars that travel all over the city. In New York: A Documentary Film, cultural critic Marshall Berman describes how the subway trains provided a means through which those (black, Hispanic and working-class people) from the impoverished neighbourhood of the Bronx were able to communicate with those in more affluent areas. As he argues, graffiti was ‘the earliest form in which most people who weren’t part of that neighbourhood’ came to understand what was happening there. Scholars who write about hip hop often argue that there are not four, but five elements; depending on who you consult, ‘knowledge’ is often considered the fifth element. |
| 1979 | 4 May: Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, having served as Leader of the Opposition since 1975. Her leadership is characterized by fiscal conservatism, economic reliance on the free-market, privatization of state-owned industry, hostility towards trade unions and scaling back the welfare state. So-called ‘Thatcherite’ politics, following the model of ‘Reaganomics’ introduced by US President Ronald Reagan, with whom Thatcher was closely allied, marks the UK’s move towards neoliberalism as an economic model (see the THEMES section for a discussion and explanation of the term ‘neoliberalism’). |
| December: The hip hop record ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by New Jersey’s the Sugarhill Gang reaches number three in the UK singles chart, marking the first mainstream success for hip hop in the United Kingdom. | |
| 1982 | December: The first British hip hop record, ‘Christmas Rapping’ by the artist Dizzy Heights, released by Polydor Records, reaches number forty-nine in the UK singles chart, following a surge of underground and self-released hip hop music. Popular British artists, including Adam and the Ants, The Clash, Malcolm McLaren and Wham! also experiment with adopting hip hop techniques into their music throughout the early 1980s, demonstrating how hip hop is beginning to take root as part of popular culture in the UK. |
| 1984 | March: The Miners’ Strike, a major industrial action staged by the National Union of Mineworkers in response to the government’s attempts to close British collieries, shuts down the UK’s coal industry. Thatcher attempts to quash the power of trade unions by opposing the strike. In June 1984, there is a violent clash between striking miners and the police at a coking plant in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Known as the ‘Battle of Orgreave’, the event sees thousands of police officers deployed, including mounted officers and police dogs, in an attempt to overwhelm the pickets. The strike is ruled illegal in September. |
| 1985 | 3 March: The Miners’ Strike officially ends. This marks a significant turning point in the culture and trajectory of the British working classes. The power of trade unions is severely weakened, and in the coming decades there is rapid deindustrialization. Opportunities for working-class people to find well-paid, secure jobs with clearly defined benefits and prospects for promotion decrease, and there is an increase in unemployment, drug abuse and social instability in former working-class strongholds. The sense of community and collectivity that characterized the mid-twentieth-century working-class experience begins to fracture, as those able to participate in the neoliberal culture leave behind those who cannot. In a now famous speech delivered in 1987, Thatcher proudly champions the era of the individual, claiming that there is ‘no such thing as society’. |
| 22 December: Kate Esther Calvert is born in London. She adopts the stage and pen name Kate Tempest in the mid-2000s after performing for a number of years under the name Excentral Tempest. She is part of the so-called ‘millennial’ generation, a term used to describe those born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s who became adults in the new millennium. Despite a growth in progressive social movements resulting in increased rights for women, ethnic minorities and LGBT people, this group will face more financial instability than previous generations and decreased social mobility – meaning that they are less likely than their parents to move into a higher social class or income bracket than the one they were born into. | |
| Tempest is raised in Lewisham, in the south-east of London. The language, culture and geography of south-east London runs through her work across music, plays, novels and poetry. | |
| 1988 | The British hip hop crew London Posse release ‘Money Mad’, a seminal track that is often considered to mark the birth of uniquely British hip hop culture. The artists use their own London accents and do not affect American-style voices as British rappers up to this point have often done. The crew also draw on dub reggae (an electronic development of reggae music), giving their music a distinctive sound that will come to distinguish British hip hop (and later the grime music that emerges from British hip hop, garage and jungle music influences) from US rap music. |
| 1990 | November: Margaret Thatcher resigns and John Major wins the leadership contest for the Conservative Party, succeeding her as Prime Minister. He goes on to win a general election in 1992. |
| 1997 | May: Labour, branded as New Labour, wins the general election and Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister. ‘New Labour’ is a rebranding of the Labour Party that signals a move away from its socialist roots. Blair’s leadership is marked by an embrace of the free-market neoliberal ideology that has now characterized British politics since Thatcher, although he makes some concessions to reinvigorating the welfare state, notably with investment in education and Child Benefit. He vows to eliminate class inequality through an expansion of the middle classes, and pursues a social inclusion agenda based on the idea of ‘equal opportunity’ for all members of society. Part of this vision includes an emphasis on urban regeneration as a response to economic disadvantage. Nonetheless, despite a period of optimism based on Blairite social-democratic policies, Britain’s historic class divisions remain entrenched. |
| 2001 | 11 September: A series of terrorist attacks on the US using hijacked planes, most iconically bringing down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, marks a seismic shift in global politics and the trajectory of both the UK and the US for the new millennium. George W. Bush, President of the United States, declares a ‘war on terror’ and the UK government, led by Blair, supports this initiative. The US and UK work in alliance to invade Afghanistan, where those held responsible for the attack were located. |
| 2003 | 19 March: The US and UK launch an attack on Iraq, claiming that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. The invasion goes ahead despite huge public resistance in the UK, including an anti-war march with the participation of an estimated one million citizens in London. When it is later discovered that Hussein’s regime did not have the capacity to stockpile weapons of mass destruction, there is huge and growing public mistrust in the government. |
| 2005 | 6 July: It is announced that London has won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics. This is a moment of huge celebration for the city. The opportunity amplifies Blair’s vision for urban regeneration, and gives investors added incentive to put money towards urban development projects, particularly in run-down neighbourhoods in east and south-east London, where the Olympics will be held. |
| 7 July: There is a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks on London, carried out by Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers who live and were raised in the UK. They leave behind videos claiming that the attack avenges atrocities carried out by the UK as part of the War on Terror. They detonate bombs on three tube trains and a bus, killing fifty-two people. | |
| 2007 | June: Gordon Brown, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, succeeds Tony Blair as Prime Minister. |
| 2008 | 15 September: Following a crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market, the bank Lehman Brothers collapses, signalling an economic crisis and a massive global recession, considered by many economists to be the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s. |
| 2010 | May: Following a general election, there is a hung parliament, meaning no single party wins an overall majority. The Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, win the most seats and form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, ending thirteen years of Labour rule. The Cameron government introduce an ‘austerity’ programme, which seeks to reduce the UK’s deficit by curbing public spending and tax rises. During austerity, conditions for the poorest members of British society worsen: there is an increase in the use of food banks, which provide free essentials such as food and toiletries to those in extreme poverty, and in exploitative employment practices such as zero-hours contracts, where staff are counted as ‘employed’ but have no guarantee of work or a fixed income. |
| 2011 | 15 July: The first performance of Wasted takes place at the Latitude Festival in Henham Park, Suffolk. |
| 6 August: Following the killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Londoner, by police on 4 August, riots break out across London and quickly spread to cities all over England, including Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Nottingham. There is widespread arson and violence, and looting of consumer goods. Despite Duggan’s killing and the strain that austerity cuts are already putting on inner-city communities, the government and press unite to declare that the riots are politically unmotivated acts of feral, criminal violence. Tempest disagrees with the media narrative, suggesting the riots were indeed politically motivated: | |
| Basically, it made sense to me I think because I’m a Londoner. It seemed absolutely logical to be honest. There was nothing about what happened then that was surprising. The narrative that was spun about it in the press was that it was this a-political consumption-like spasm, that’s absolute fucking nonsense. | |
| 2011 | also sees a wave of political movements across the globe, including the ‘Arab Spring’ (a series of pro-democracy protests in countries including Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Syria) and Occupy Wall Street, an anti-capitalist occupation in New York (later adopted elsewhere in the world including in Amsterdam, Paris, London and Hong Kong). |
| 2012 | Summer: London hosts the Olympics. The slow regeneration of the city that has been happening since at least the New Labour urban development drive at the turn of the century continues apace. Investment in new building developments renders many of London’s former working-class neighbourhoods almost completely unrecognizable. |
| Kate Tempest develops Brand New Ancients, an epic spoken word poem at the Battersea Arts Centre in London; in 2013 this work wins the Ted Hughes Award for innovation in poetry. |
Context: History, Society, Politics
When we study plays it can be tempting to begin with explorations of plot and character: to think about the emotional arc of a story and how it connects with us on a human level. What it made us feel. Wasted is, of course, a human story, especially resonant in terms of its emphasis on loss and friendship. The play follows 25-year-old south-east Londoners Ted, Danny and Charlotte on the ten-year anniversary of their friend Tony’s death. As they deal with their grief and contemplate how life has progressed in the decade since Tony died, the trio face the limitations of their own happiness and, partying into the night, they try to work out what they might want from the future. The ‘wasted’ of the play’s title refers both to the state of the characters’ ‘wasted’ youth and potential, as well as to the fact that they are ‘wasted’ (inebriated on alcohol and drugs) by the end of the play.
Our emotional responses to characters and situations on stage are often deep and lasting. This means we might think about the emotional effects (that is, how the performance makes us feel) as ‘timeless’. In Wasted this timeless quality is evident in a number of central themes, particularly in its exploration of the transition between youth and adulthood, a universal experience that is often deeply unsettling and fraught with uncertainty and indecision. We can also see timeless elements in the play’s treatment of grief and loss, and in the central unresolved love story between Charlotte and Danny.
However, although Wasted has aspects that we might consider timeless, it also speaks very clearly to the social, political and historical moment in which it was written and performed. With an understanding of history and contemporary politics, we can map local, national and global events onto the play in order to help us think about it in a more focused, strategic way. Taking a step back like this – understanding the specifics of ‘where, how and what’ is on stage – can be a useful first step in the process of analysis, before we think about the meaning or emotional resonance of the work in general terms. Understanding context helps us to consider how performances work not only as entertainment, but as social and historical documents (situated in a specific time and place) that comment upon the world they are part of.
In the CHRONOLOGY section at the start of this volume I lay out a timeline with quite a detailed account of local, national and global events leading up to and following the first performance of Wasted in 2011. At first glance these may seem random in their selection: the evolution of hip hop in the Bronx, New York and its adoption into UK popular culture; the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike; shifting political power in the UK; the birth of the millennial generation; the rise of neoliberalism; urban regeneration; the War on Terror; the 2011 UK riots and the decision to stage the Olympics in London. But, as I indicate in the header of the CHRONOLOGY section, these historical events, ostensibly unrelated, converge in Wasted in numerous ways. Although they are not directly addressed, these events sit underneath the narrative, shaping the social conditions that make the play possible and providing contexts that we can use to interpret what happens on stage.
The chorus, for example, draws on oral traditions rooted in hip hop culture (see the FORM AND GENRE section of this introduction). It uses the actors’ ‘real’ voices to confront issues of millennial crisis, drawing attention to the hopeless, resigned state of a youth who are worse off than their parents’ generation, and have no means of changing their reality. As the actors narrate towards the end of Chorus One:
Two We realised,
One This is all there is.
Three There really isn’t more.
One Staring down the barrel
Two Of an empty bottle
Three Asking it to give us
All More.1
Earlier generations – for example the hippies of the 1960s, the punks of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Free Party ravers of the 1990s – demonstrated their dissatisfaction with the status quo through identifiable movements, characterized by distinct styles and politics. These youth cultures often expressed counter-cultural ideals and acted directly and with urgency against prevailing social norms. What we see in Wasted, however, is a youth culture mired in a sense of hopelessness, with the characters unable to imagine or facilitate a life outside of the status quo. They are living in a bland, apolitical hedonism (chasing drink, drugs, romantic relationships, travel), and are ultimately trapped by work and the need to work. Interestingly this is even the case for Danny, who doesn’t have a regular job, but is trying to ‘make it’ with his band. In Scene Three, he tells Ted he can’t join Charlotte travelling because he is waiting for his big break (‘we got this gig next week. You know, a big one. Might be some labels there’).2 Although it is suffocating him, the promise of commercial success proves too enticing to ignore.
The lack of an identifiable youth-driven politics in Wasted is perhaps symptomatic of a culture at large that has lost trust in political structures as a result of world events, exacerbated by an increasingly neoliberal environment. The events of 9/11, the resultant War on Terror (particularly the invasion of Iraq), and the 2008 financial crisis have deepened the sense both that politicians do not represent the interests of ordinary people, and that hoping for change is futile. This futility is suggested in the chorus (Chorus Two) as the actors stand on stage and tell the audience:
One Change coming!
Two Change coming!
One I swear we can change something.
Three We change nothing.
Two Change is puffing up its chest.
One Change is jumping to its death.
Three Change is running,
One Short of breath,
Two Change is falling
Three Change is calling on its people
Two Change’s people are not talking
One Nothing changes.3
The repeated refrain ‘change’ in this hip hop style oration evokes the iconic track ‘Changes’, by American rapper Tupac. The academic Chris Richardson details how Tupac’s lyrics might be read as a wail of despair that echoes out from the inner city, calling for help from those with the means to intervene.4 We might read Tempest’s chorus in the same way. Just as subway cars carried messages etched in graffiti from the Bronx into Manhattan,5 the chorus brings the conditions of working-class London to the theatre, a traditionally elite cultural space. Indeed, at the start of the play the chorus draw attention to the fact we are in a theatre, emphasizing the disjuncture between this space and the lives depicted on stage. We might understand Wasted therefore as an attempt to reveal the conditions of those on the margins of society to those at the centre.
Throughout Wasted the characters struggle to ‘change’ – to break out of repetitive, soul-destroying routines. In many ways the play is a lamentation on the social order that sees working-class people relegated to the bottom of the pile. Although Ted, Charlotte and Danny are not traditional working-class, manual-labouring figures, they speak with local accents, and express their affiliation with those left out of mainstream culture through their words and actions. In Scene Two, for example, Charlotte, in her monologue to Tony, describes how she noticed a party of private school boys on a field trip as she travelled on a train into central London. She is struck by the stark difference between their lives and the lives of the children she teaches (presumably in south-east London). She describes how the boys from the private school spoke ‘beautifully’, looked healthy and easy in their own bodies; how they helped one another with algebra and French homework:
it didn’t seem fair. I thought of the kids here, in my class, with their squinty eyes and bad skin, mouths full of swear words and silence, and it didn’t seem fair. And I’m stood there and I feel like bursting into tears and telling them all to run out on the streets and smash windows or something, do something.6
In this speech (and later when Danny refers to not having been to university7) there is a bubbling class politics, which hints at the injustices that neoliberalism, with its focus on individual success, has wrought on the working classes. Charlotte’s call to her students to ‘do something’ is optimistically futile when we consider how attempts by the working-class to ‘do something’ about the conditions of their existence have played out in the recent past (for example, during the UK industrial strikes of the 1980s, which all but destroyed the strength of the trade unions), and the way that neoliberal politics and subsequent austerity measures have produced worsening conditions for the poorest in society.
Charlotte’s statement is also prophetic. Three weeks after the first performance of Wasted in 2011, riots broke out in London and across England. These riots revealed simmering race and class tensions. The images and videos of the riots, documented in news media and still available on internet platforms such as YouTube, demonstrate exactly how disenfranchised youths took to the streets and smashed windows in an attempt to ‘do something’ about the unfairness of their lives. Tempest’s ability to predict this event reveals how her writing is embedded in its social and historical context, reflecting the atmosphere of the world it represents.
Wasted takes place in a London that is rapidly undergoing transformation via urban development. Again, moments in the play that deal with this context point both to the specific period in which it was written, and predict changes that happen after the first performance. In Scene One, for example, Danny invites Ted to a party. Ted, sarcastically guessing what the party will be like, describes a ‘warehouse in Peckham full of wannabe rude boys out to rob phones, and trendy fuckin’ art students passed out in the corner experiencing Ketamine’.8 This description draws on tropes of what the sociologist Ruth Glass called ‘gentrification’.9 Gentrification describes how formerly working-class neighbourhoods become fashionable, inhabited by artists and students before attracting developers who price out existing residents. Eventually, once working-class neighbourhoods become dominated by the middle classes, as poorer residents are displaced or forced elsewhere (a process that has accelerated in London since the 2012 Olympics, and has been called ‘social cleansing’). The ‘warehouse’ Ted imagines the party taking place in is typical of the kind of trendy, pop-up social venues that began to spring up in areas like Peckham in the run-up to the London Olympics. The term ‘pop-up’ refers to an enterprise such as a café, shop, restaurant, bar or club, that makes temporary, often creative, use of a disused urban building.10 These venues made Peckham and other districts that had previously been considered run-down (notably Hackney in east London) attractive to investors, who often built properties hoping to lure buyers seduced by the new nightlife and culture. Ted’s animosity towards the ‘warehouse’ venue points to Tempest’s cynicism towards this kind of speculative investment; one that has changed the face of London in the years since Wasted was written. Indeed, this is a theme Tempest has returned to in later works. On the album Let Them Eat Chaos (2016), for example, the song ‘Perfect Coffee’ describes the feeling of being alienated from your home environment in the wake of urban regeneration and investment that has destroyed everything familiar. The writer and performer Arinzé Kene also explores the effects of gentrification in his play Misty (Bush Theatre 2018).11
Despite the very human story at the heart of Wasted, then, it is nonetheless a play that we can read contextually. By mapping significant political, cultural and historical events onto the world of the play we begin to understand how its contents emerge in conversation with the wider world. This allows us a better understanding both of the play itself and of the human impact of the events that contextualize it.
Form and Genre
In Wasted, Tempest juxtaposes two stylistic forms: the chorus and the realistic or ‘naturalistic’ scenes. In doing this, she plays with a number of contemporary and historical literary and performance techniques, including poetry, direct address to the audience, monologues and dramatic scenes with two or three characters.
What we call ‘form’ describes the elements that give shape to a play (or piece of literature or music) and, together with content, places it in a particular genre. The formal juxtapositions of Wasted mean the play sits across a number of genres (or categories), most significantly hip hop, verse drama and realism (or ‘naturalism’), discussed in more detail below. These elements work separately and together to create meaning, and connect the play to different contemporary and historical moments.