Wasted, Kate Tempest (Writer)

Commissioned for last year’s Latitude Festival, Wasted is the first play written by 20-year-old beat-poet Kate Tempest. It follows the lives of three post-adolescents as they stumble their way through a drug-fuelled night out, assessing their lives and dealing with the difficulties that come with growing up and being faced with the real world.

For those of you who don’t know what beat-poetry is, I suggest you look up Kate Tempest’s performances on YouTube. The style of speech in these poems is fluid verses of rhyme that are delivered as a spontaneous stream of consciousness. Tempest has written hundreds of poems on various commissions, released two spoken-word records and has just published an anthology of her work. However, Wasted is her first play and I was keen to see the transition from poetry to prose.

The play opens with the three friends – Ted, Danny and Charlotte – addressing the audience directly. They each have a microphone, which makes their voices resonate over the loud club music that preceded their entrance onto the stage. They speak in turn, sometimes overlapping, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences, but all the time speaking in the familiar rhythmic poetry that is so archetypal of Tempest’s work.

As the play pans out we learn more about the lives of the three. Ted works in an office but isn’t really happy, Charlotte is a teacher who feels like she’s wasting her life teaching kids who don’t want to be taught, and Danny is in a band you’ve never heard of that isn’t going anywhere. All three are drawn together by the death of friend Tony. The scenes are split into three types, individual monologues, scenes that play out the events of the night as they happened and the afore-mentioned three-way addresses. While the monologues are the strongest points – particularly Charlotte’s heartfelt speech where I felt Tempest’s true style came through – the latter three-ways are where the play falls flattest. The idea is promising: splitting a monologue between three people who pick up on each other’s cues with such fluidity that it sounds like one speech. However, some cues were dropped and it was done at such a speed that it came across as if the performers weren’t completely comfortable on stage.

The set itself is impressive. Unassuming black walls, floor and ceiling mean that the transitions from park, to café, to nightclub are seamless with no messy set-changes during their infrequent blackouts. The main focus is the enormous screen at the back of the stage, framed by ultra-violet lights and speakers. Onto the screen are projected the various backdrops, instantly transforming the stage for its intended purpose to great effect. I always find the use of media interesting in performance. It’s a thin line to tread between cinema and theatre and shows can often be found guilty of having overly distracting cinematography, drawing your gaze like moths to the light and making it hard to follow what is happening on-stage. Wasted avoids such a trap by using the screen merely as a moving backdrop during dialogue and saving the most absorbing camera-work for when it was the sole focus of the stage. The lighting too, is colourful and engaging and is as perfectly adapted for the hectic and vibrant nightclub scenes as it is for the stale artificial light of the café the morning-after.

The main criticism I gathered from my fellow audience members was that they found the play to be somewhat patronising. The repeated message of ‘you can live your dreams’ and ‘be anything you want to be’ was rather thrusted in the audience’s faces throughout the play. I think this was perhaps something that can be pinned down to problems an inexperienced playwright is always going to encounter. Common themes throughout much of Tempest’s work are the lack of ambition in the youth of society and how to inspire those neglected and with low aspirations. Naturally, this was the focus of Wasted, however I think Tempest could have afforded to allow her audience with a little more intelligence. The message came across most beautifully when it was subtly implied, through the characters internal monologues and the realism of their interactions. The direct addresses of the audience were therefore unnecessarily explicit and came across a little preachy.

Having said that, I still think that Tempest shows great promise as a playwright. Her style of writing is unique and I think the transition from beat poetry to theatre is a medium that could be developed further. The interactions between characters were very fluid and immediate which is a real testament to Tempest’s writing. Often, with writing that tries to reflect how young people to speak, it comes across as jarring and insincere. Tempest dealt with that problem with remarkable dexterity, accompanied by the talent of those performing, and delivered scenes that were both entertaining and relatable.

Overall, Wasted, though not without its faults, is a good piece of theatre. The performances were strong and the set and soundscapes were inspired. I hope to see more of Tempest’s work take to the stage.