What would you do if a childhood friend you hadn’t seen in 20 years presented you with a bag containing £30,000 in exchange to do one important, life-changing job for her? It’s an offer hard to refuse when you’re currently living hand-to-mouth with 5 kids, but what, exactly, is the cost?
Olivier Award-winning Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s The Wasp was first staged at Trafalgar Studios in 2015 before being adapted into a feature film released in 2024. Directed by James Haddrell, the two-woman play has found a new home in the intimate stage of Southwark Playhouse Borough, before transferring to Greenwich Theatre.
Following childhood friends Heather and Carla as they meet for coffee for the first time in decades, the lights darken as Carla (Serin Ibrahim) enters stage, chain-smoking in the garden of a coffee shop. Her hair is slicked back in a scrunchie, gold hoops in her ears while visibly pregnant in a tracksuit. In walks Heather (Cassandra Hercules) in black heels, completely juxtaposed to Carla in her well-put together chic coat and scarf.
From the outfits to the prim and proper language of Heather that contrasts the brashness of Carla, it’s clear that they’re now very different people and have lived very different lives since being at school together. The meeting is awkward, with both actors brilliantly playing off that strange tension of meeting up with someone so vastly different to you 20 years later.
As Carla continues to smoke and Heather awkwardly clicks around the garden with her cup of tea in hand, secrets from the past and present are unveiled.
The genius of the play lies in the performances, with Ibrahim and Hercules doing a brilliant job of depicting the power play of the two characters, their chemistry palatable. Ibrahim, in particular, is fantastic at showing the slow unravelling of Carla’s “don’t mess with me” energy into something much more vulnerable as the plot progresses. Her emotional range is untouched.
While Hercules is much more hyperbolic and melodramatic in performance, her monologues are astounding. She expertly manipulates her body language and vocal range to show the manic, unhinged behaviour of Heather. My only complaint would be at times it’s hard to take her seriously in her actions when her clothes are a little too big, her shoes not quite fitting: was this intentional? A visual reminder of her instability, or was it just a lack of costume budget?
The directorial choices from James Haddrell are… something. In the first 35 minutes, the play offers transitions where suddenly a buzzing wasp sound enters the room, an irritating song plays loudly from the speakers, the lights flicker and the actors switch places and repeat their last lines. This sometimes happens twice, three times in one moment. Initially, I thought this was to offer the audience a new perspective but there is little difference in the delivery of the lines. This then only happens once in the second half of the play, with this time the delivery so vastly different that I was left completely bamboozled as to what the directorial purpose and intention was. If anything, I was left with the lasting thought that such a decision was redundant and irritating.
With simple staging: a coffee table, two cups of tea, two chairs and a backdrop of a display of insects and spiders, The Wasp is dialogue heavy. With a run-time of 90-minutes, relying primarily on dialogue to build the tension is impressive. However, it is after the first 35 minutes that we get an interval, destroying all tension and drama that’s been building up in the first half. Perhaps it’s an opportunity for the audience to ponder exactly what the incessant buzzing and repetitions means with the person sitting next to them but all it does is diffuse everything the two characters have been setting up for the last half, making them work harder to rebuild the tension again in act 2.
Marketed as a psychological thriller, The Wasp keeps you constantly guessing as to how the plot will progress, surprising you when it goes even further than what you expect. It’s plot twist after plot twist. Almost, dare I say, too many plot twists? There comes a point where the sudden and dramatic turns take the power out of them. It’s even more disappointing when by the end, the play ends exactly where the audiences expected it to.
How far would you go if someone hurt you in your past? How far are you willing to let your trauma dictate your actions decades later? The Wasp asks the audience to decide exactly whose side are you on – Carla’s or Heather’s? Or are they as equally as bad as each other? The Wasp explores very heavy-hitting topics around sexual abuse, kidnapping and violence but sadly, it doesn’t leave the mark it wants to, leaving me disappointed, rather than thrilled.
The Wasp runs at Southwark Playhouse Borough (The Little) until May 30 and Greenwich Theatre from September 4 to 12.
Photo: Ross Kernahan
JADAR 