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.