First Production
Wasted was first performed at the Latitude Festival, which is an annual music event that takes place at Henham Park, a sprawling country estate and former hunting ground in Suffolk, England. The production then toured the UK. Music festivals have become significant features of contemporary youth culture. Performance scholar Kathleen (‘Alice’) O’Grady has written about the potential of the festival site for fostering connection and creating a space for playful exploration.1 She demonstrates how contemporary music festivals emerged from the Free Party scene of the 1980s and 1990s, associated with hedonism, drug taking and political activism (contemporary festivals also have their roots in the youth-driven festivals of the 1960s and 1970s in both the US and UK; Woodstock and Glastonbury being important historical examples). Music festivals today still retain traces of this radical history. Although the content of Wasted can be thought about in terms of the ‘hopeless millennial’ moment, then, we could also look at this specific first production and think about how the festival site connects the play to histories of radical youth movements – further emphasizing its ‘youth culture’ theme.
Plays make meaning not just through what is on stage and in the text, but also through where and how they are performed. Importantly, we can ‘read’ meanings onto the works we are analysing, using them to think more deeply about issues that might only be tangential to the plot or content of the plays themselves. In other words, plays don’t only mean one thing. What we understand about what we see on stage depends on our own experiences, thought processes and points of view.
Perhaps then we can see Wasted as more hopeful when it is performed in a festival environment. Or perhaps we can think about how the world of ‘wasted’ young people on stage reflects the world of the festival and turns a mirror back on the audience. Another reading might be made in thinking about how festivals themselves, which were once radical anarchic sites, have been co-opted by corporate sponsors – what does the hopeless capitalist routine of wasting life in soulless corporate environments and trying to escape through drugs and alcohol have to say to us about the corporate sponsored festival? How can we make sense of a drama that is critical of the capitalist system, at a festival taking place on a country manor estate, the symbolic space of the landed gentry, bound up in the history of the UK’s oppressive class system?
In the first production of Wasted, a large screen was used to project images, such as the opening motifs, to the audience. This illustrates one way in which a directorial choice was made that differs to the stage directions in the printed text. We might understand this decision too as a comment on contemporary youth culture, with the escalation of screen media via the use of mobile phones then (in 2011) a fairly recent development, as Tempest explained to me in an interview:
Wasted came at the tail end of a time where things were on the cusp of changing. Things really, really changing. I think what I mean is the prevalence of information, the surge in the availability of new and social media, and the addictive nature of the smartphone as it gets more common to have one. Suddenly there’s this attachment to phones.