Review: The Wasp, Southwark Playhouse ***½

Cassandra Hercules and Serin Ibrahim SW The Wasp photo by Ross Kernahan

A sting in the tale: two extraordinary performances in a thriller that will leave you thinking

Two women, a pub table, and an enormous amount of unspoken history. That is all Morgan Lloyd Malcolm needs to build a psychological thriller that wrong-foots you at almost every turn, and this new revival of Wasp from Greenwich Theatre Productions (now playing at Southwark Playhouse Borough) she has two actors more than equal to the task.

Heather (Cassandra Hercules) and Carla (Serin Ibrahim) have not seen each other since school. When they meet, every unspoken British class marker is present and correct. Heather nurses a chamomile tea; she has already had rather too much caffeine that day, a latte – of course. Carla lights up, chain-smoking, heavily pregnant, wearing the sort of loose tracksuit that speaks to a life lived under very different pressures.

We do not often say these things aloud in this country, but we all know them, and it is one of Malcolm’s real gifts that she writes them so precisely onto the stage. The power dynamic between these two women is established in minutes and it is one that anyone who has ever navigated the unwritten rules of British social class will instantly recognise.

Because the play is not, at heart, simply about class. It is about what school does to us, and how long it does it for. The question Malcolm keeps pressing is whether we can ever truly leave our school years behind and whether those who carried the most pain from that time are, in some sense, still living there. The play asks whether we can ever truly understand the roots of the cruelty we encounter, and whether those of us formed in security and warmth are, paradoxically, the least equipped to do so. It also asks something harder still: does the source of someone’s cruelty excuse it? Does suffering give anyone the right to make another person’s life a misery?

What Heather actually wants from this meeting is the central mystery of the first half. Each time we think we have grasped her motivation, the script pulls the rug away, and what she wants seems to grow progressively darker. Heather judges Carla from the moment they sit down, the judgement barely concealed beneath careful politeness, and Carla meets every slight with brash bravado, armoured in defiance.

Heading into the interval, Heather appears to be the less sympathetic of the two, despite the chamomile tea and the veneer of middle-class composure. That composure reads, in Hercules’ careful and precise performance, as armour worn over something deeply vulnerable. Serin Ibrahim’s Carla crackles with an energy that feels entirely real: her indignation, her deflection, her bursts of profanity. You can entirely believe in her as someone who made school unbearable for another child, and equally see how early motherhood and economic hardship have kept her exactly where life placed her. Both performances are outstanding, and their shifting, uneasy chemistry is the engine of the whole piece.

The second half changes tone considerably. What began as dark comedy tipping towards something more unsettling becomes genuinely sinister, and the script goes to places that are brave and not always comfortable.

The production’s structural devices, scenes repeated with slightly different emphasis, flickering lights, the persistent sound of wasps, are clearly doing thematic work, and a key scene exploring the Tarantula Hawk Wasp’s chilling maternal instincts plants clues about where the plot is headed. The question of which character is the wasp, Heather, Carla, or perhaps both, is one the play keeps deliberately open. But the sting? That arrives with full force, and you will not see it coming.

The repetitions do take a little time to decode, and a slightly clunky set change between the two locations drops the pace at a moment when momentum matters. Some of the coincidences required to drive the plot also push at plausibility. These are minor caveats in an otherwise well-crafted production, and Jana Lakatos‘ design serves both settings effectively.

The Wasp is a play about class, about trauma, and about whether the damage done in childhood can ever fully be left behind. As a teacher, I left thinking about all of it. It is not comfortable theatre, but it is theatre that stays with you, performed by two actors at the very top of their game, in a space that makes you feel every bit of the tension.