Brand New Ancients at Battersea Arts Centre

Following her massively successful book launch in the massive Old Vic, now Kate Tempest has a play out too. Written across a year at Battersea Arts Centre with regular, public, work-in-progress rehearsals, Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients is a good argument for giving artists time, space, support and money and letting them produce something innovative.

The play opens with Kate lying motionless on the stacked blocks of a simple stage set, legs stretched out (wearing odd socks) as if in a trance in her room at home. Behind her a band of drums, cello, violin and tuba play a city-traffic-dreamscape that is the prologue for this urban tale.

The idea of the Brand New Ancients concept is that we are all gods, heroes, giants, villains – at times all of them. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the artist creates modern myths in old frameworks. Like Dizraeli with his idea of ‘small gods’, there are no idols, queens or kings when all people are little gods themselves.  As the ‘ancients’ created myth to understand and explain the world, so should we too make our symbols and stories from a “brand new mythic pallet”.