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 Understanding context helps us to consider how performances work not only as entertainment, but as social and historical documents (situated in a specific time and place) that comment upon the world they are part of.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.