Review: THE WASP, Southwark Playhouse

An awkward school reunion between childhood friends turns into a seething, horrid thriller in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play The Wasp. The long-term effects of bullying and the despair of the economic gap gather to deliver an ever-turning, slow-burning, stomach-churning piece of theatre. Director James Haddrell brings it back to the stage after the IP was adapted into a film a few years back.

Cassandra Hercules (Heather) and Serin Ibrahim (Carla) instantly engage in close combat, building their performances upon a foundation of hard stares met by evasive eyes. As they dig up the past, Carla’s early cruelty comes out in disturbing waves. From torturing pigeons on their way home to committing an astonishingly serious and life-altering crime, another story is told.

Lloyd Malcolm buries a precise social critique just below the surface. The pair’s psychological warfare hides a deeper reflection on class divide and domestic abuse, as well as the failure of the systems that should be put in place to protect kids. However, The Wasp is much more clever than that, and we can safely side with neither Carla nor Heather. While the former has been undoubtedly cruel, the latter has grown equally vicious. It’s a darkly fun dynamic to present.

Jealously, rivalry, motherhood, and various kinds of inferiority complexes fuel the characters, leading them to act irrationally. Impulse and premeditation come into question in a twisted game of blame that deliciously leads to the lack of an answer. The script is a cornucopia of themes and provocations, but Haddrell’s production struggles to establish the right atmosphere for it to thrive.

The first big issue is the pacing. Haddrell opts to break up the scenes by abruptly stopping and restarting them with minor changes in tone. Lights flicker and a buzzing sound arrests the actors, who then reprise from a few lines back in different positions (to probably indicate a shift in perspective, though there isn’t really any). It should coil the plot, emphasising their exchange to up the tension, but it grows old and trite by the half-hour mark, which is where the problem of the interval enters the picture.

The momentum is lost as the action breaks and the audience is let out of the room. We pick back up where we left off to reiterate how unnecessary it is to pause. It gets better from here onwards, with Haddrell doubling down on Heather’s recollections of the brutal treatment she received from Carla, giving Hercules a chance to go full psycho mode while Ibrahim’s Carla scrambles. While the re-sets take longer than needed and therefore are slightly disengaging, the second act improves.

As the performers finally sink their teeth into each other, their portrayals come together with emotive depth. We see what has fuelled Heather all these years and where Carla’s scars have come from. At last, the pace fully leans into the suspense of it all, briefly winning the crowd back with dramatic flair before the final murder scene lands it in a bit of a silly way. The quality of the show ends up being more of a rollercoaster than the play itself.

The Wasp runs at Southwark Playhouse until 30 May.

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