Leith Theatre
Five stars
When Kate Tempest
returns to the stage after performing her recent album, The Book of Traps and
Lessons, in full, it’s not for some cathartic air-punching encore to lap up the
love she’s just been shown. Rather, with the quiet humility that powers her
poetics, the spiritual grand-daughter of Albion explains exactly why she isn’t
doing one.
It’s a tellingly human
way for the Herald Angel winning writer and performer to end a show that’s both
incendiary and intimate. As Tempest stands before the light of a blood red moon
that acts as a backdrop, she leaves herself exposed and vulnerable to the dancing
searchlights that illuminate her as if she’s permanently under siege. As she
spews out her urgent soothsaying against the rhythmic fizz of an electronic
soundscape provided by lone synth player Clare Uchima, Tempest becomes the conscience
of broken Britain and all those who have fallen down the cracks in its wake.
At times her tumble of
words are evocations of collective agony, at others steeped in righteous fury.
The two collide in an opening set that begins with Europe is Lost from Tempest’s
2018 Let Them Eat Chaos record. In terms of state of the nations addresses, its
uneasy trawl through a dystopian present is as right here, right now as it
gets.
Through this and the
following We Die and Marshall Law, Tempest gives voice to a numbed underclass
who survive through cheap thrills in bite-size plays for today that immortalise
the fractured community she occupies. Fired from the same lyrical inner-city cauldron
as post-punk poet Anne Clark, Tempest’s litanies of everyday despair are the
sound of a permanent come-down, leavened only by the occasional techno wig-out.
The Book of Traps and Lessons
is even more downbeat, from the fragile tryst of Thirsty, the unaccompanied starkness
of All Humans Too Late and the church organ-backed preaching of Hold Your Own.
Finally, in the hymnal People’s Faces, Tempest’s fractured redemption song
offers some kind of salvation after the storm.
The Herald, August 11th 2019
ends
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