Kate Tempest has a child-like girl-next-door innocence about her. Fresh-faced and youthful in a sleeveless print cotton top, dark blue jeans and 
white converse – how can she understand humankind’s inner world so intimately, and describe it with such simple artistry? At the performance of ‘Brand New Ancients’ at the Bristol Old Vic on Friday night I was assailed by a sense I often experience in non-church environments, that somehow we have been careless with our treasure, our heritage, our spirituality; so God has moved out of his temple for a more dynamic, truthful environment.
Kate cried out with a pain, poetry and urgency worthy of the Old Testament prophets, rapping from the depths of her belly the story of our capacity to be in one lifetime both gods and monsters. As her body wrenched in compassion, in tune with the Greek chorus of tuba, violin, cello and drums framing the story, she called us with a striking authority to an almost desperate hope, and an identification with our fellow human beings who are trying like us to survive the sticky labyrinthine web of our life’s inheritance.
I cast my mind around for a memory of an experience this compelling, this compassionate, dare I say it? – this priestly – in any service of worship I have ever attended, and my net comes up empty. She was on the stage, but in her heart she was with us on the floor of the theatre, one of us, caught in the same web, and gutsy enough to pray in a visceral way as though she were everywoman and everyman and our future hung upon her words.
Ezekiel describes the terrifying departure of God from his temple (Ezek 10): there is a precedent for him going AWOL under intolerable circumstances. God is truth: not fixed, packageable, off-the-shelf ideological truth, but honesty, authenticity, integrity, rightness. And he gives truth as a gift to anyone with the courage to face up to it: the truth about the extent of our lostness, and the truth about the extent of our foundness. I’m not sure I do have the courage often to face up to the horror of the one or the searing glory of the other, but if I did, I might speak with the prophetic passion and authority of Kate Tempest.
kate.tempest.co.uk
