Lloyd Evans
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The new script introduces us to Morna and Athol, brother and sister, mid-40s, estranged for some reason. They stand before us, in their crappy clothes and their crinkled, rain-worn faces, and unleash soliloquies which take us into every crevice and nook of their mediocrity. Athol is a mildly prosperous builder. Morna is a mildly impoverished skivvy, who likes working for posh Morningside couples whose nice homes arouse her grudge-fuelled envy and martyred uselessness.
The storyline takes in a great mesh of ill-assorted bric-à-brac: a teenager’s love of comics, a dog that chewed someone’s elbow, a 21st birthday party that goes a bit wrong, the failed attempt by a pair of terrorist tribute acts to blow up Glasgow airport in 2007. ‘Trust Scotland to produce crap terrorists,’ is Athol’s description of the atrocity-that-wasn’t. A good line. Worth keeping, just about, along with his reference to bungalows as ‘death’s waiting-rooms’. But the rest? Select all. Delete all. That’s the best way to ‘set great store by what’s unsaid’.
However, the play is due to tour so it’s worth adding that Susan Vidler, as Morna, delivers an enjoyable brand of ferocious cattiness. And cuddly Lewis Howden easily finds the part of himself that corresponds to Athol’s twiddle-some ineffectuality. The staging, which is elaborately static and dull, is tailored to match the script with something approaching perfection. It offers a meticulously detailed portrait of two blithering dolts.
Kate Tempest, a well-known rapper, has written her first play for Paines Plough. Wasted introduces us to a trio of twenty-somethings, ‘knee-deep in the weekend’, who take ferocious quantities of speed, dope and whisky. Beneath the drugs, they’re middle-class types with steady jobs and suburban aspirations. Danny wants to repair his broken relationship with Charlotte. Ted is torn between the whizz-binge and an Ikea-safari with his girlfriend.
Some aspects of the play work well. The fusion of performance poetry and drama succeeds. But the video inserts, as always, dampen the live action. Tempest’s writing is still too bloated with adolescent hate. Writers find it exciting to hammer raw emotion into the keyboard but it rarely fizzles with the same energies on stage. Narky little speeches challenging authority feel glib and shallow in a theatre.
Comic observations are better value. One of the lads imagines himself, aged 45, partying like mad ‘and telling myself I’ve still got it’ while trying to chat up ‘a 19-year-old acid casualty called Sparkle’. His pal laments that all his new friends have ‘adjectives instead of first names’.
Charlotte, the play’s most satisfying character, is a state school teacher who spots a group of public school boys in the street. Eloquently and lovingly, she describes their polished manners, their intellectual sophistication and their physical beauty. But when she reflects that her pupils will never enjoy the privileges of the elite, she calls for a riot. If this reflects the mood of teaching today, then the profession needs emergency treatment. Charlotte’s desire to fight inequality is admirable but to attack the state that provides her job-for-life is barmy. Even barmier is a system that hires teachers who spend their spare time on Class-A drugs. That part may be fictional, of course. But since we have the means to test drivers for narcotics we could easily extend the system to schools. Would teachers object? Well, hardly. They’d cheer at the chance to demonstrate their purity of mind and body to the rest of us. Let’s do it. For the teachers’ sake.
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