Sit too close to the front at the Dorfman Theatre for Alexander Zeldin’s new play, Love, and you’ll find yourself in the kitchen of the temporary accommodation the characters live in. During the constant battles over the one toilet, shared between eight people, certain sounds may make you long for the fourth wall.
The National Theatre production follows the inhabitants of typical shared temporary accommodation for a few days – a situation that increasing numbers of people find themselves in. Statistics released recently found that in the third quarter of 2016, 74,630 adults lived in temporary accommodation and 117,520 children.
Temporary accommodation is both limbo and prison: the people trapped there know the official line that says they’ll be cooped up short-term, but the reality is different. Emma, three weeks from giving birth when her landlord evicts her, her partner and two children, accuses her immediate neighbours of lying when they tell her they’ve been in the same room for a year. While government guidelines state that families with children should not be housed in bed-and-breakfast style accommodation for longer than six weeks, the most recent statistics show this remains the reality for hundreds of families.
There are many different reasons why the tenants in Love’s small building ending up in temporary accommodation, from the private landlord’s decision to evict the family, their neighbours being told they could have better accommodation if they agreed to leave the flat they were living in, to the newly arrived Syrian refugee who arrives with a single suitcase. But each of the characters is in an identical situation through no fault of their own, and at the mercy of a failed social housing system where demand outstrips supply. They butt their heads against the gatekeeping bureaucracy of the local council and Jobcentre, imposing sanctions and withholding bidding numbers, while people spend all day at the housing office waiting for a five-minute appointment that changes nothing.
The play shows the mundane hardships of living in such accommodation: the stolen crockery, the differing hygiene standards, how to cope when you want to eat alone with your children to cling to a semblance of normality as other people’s loneliness threatens to intrude. But it also shows how people find ways of overcoming their frustration – trying to decorate an institutional space for Christmas so your children don’t panic about their predicament or, in one particularly poignant scene, when a son, caring for his ill mother washes her hair in the sink as a treat.
Zeldin’s previous play, Beyond Caring, dealt with zero-hours contracts; Love joins a raft of plays that have dealt with housing and homelessness in the last few years. Much has been made of the 50th anniversary of Cathy Come Home, but in the arts, homelessness and the housing crisis have become mainstream topics to cover because so many people are affected.
It is difficult to discuss modern Britain without instantly nodding to the problem of housing, from street homelessness, households in temporary accommodation, the firesale of social housing, and the problems of private renting.
This is the new normal: topics chosen not because of their worthiness but because they’ve forced themselves into the public realm by their ubiquity and far-reaching consequences. A look back at the arts and culture generated in this period will show that the problem of housing is not even close to being solved.
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