Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Kate Tempest

Few would describe the south Londoner’s poetry as ‘moreish’. Less-ish, perhaps

Kate Tempest, a 30 year old dramatist and poet, has an appeal that’s hard to fathom. Is it all in the elbows? Like most performers raised on hip hop, she recites with her upper limbs flapping and wiggling as if by remote control. For emphasis she uses that impatient downward flicking gesture, beloved of rappers, like a countess at a buffet ridding her fingers of unwanted guacamole.

Few would describe the south Londoner’s poetry as ‘moreish’. Less ish, perhaps. She sates the ear too rapidly because her technique has an obvious and easily corrected fault: no variety. Tempo and mood never change, so she can’t create expectation, uncertainty, surprise or relief. Every line sounds like its predecessor, half sung on a falling note, and every word seems to exult in its contact with the dolorous and moribund. Here’s a snippet from ‘My Shakespeare’, which the RSC, along with BP, commissioned from her in 2012. Tempest delivers the poem in her habitual tone of querulous anger:

He’s less the tights and garters
More the sons demanding answers
From the absence of their fathers.
The hot darkness of a doomed embrace.


Metrical rigour and adroit rhyming are not yet among her accomplishments. She has a pretty, cherubic face, framed by unbrushed red blonde hair and she speaks in a Caribbean lite patois that translates ‘those things’ into ‘dem fings’. This linguistic pattern has many fans among the elite. It’s seen as an emblem of barbarous innocence, of instinctive passions bred in the ghetto, of an unschooled and therefore superior creativity. And it particularly excites Arts Council grandees who believe their mission is to reach down to the uncivilised and protean human type. Which Tempest perfectly represents.

She is also, like many a timid and parochial spirit, pessimistic to the point of superstition.

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