The Wasp (Trafalgar Studios)
The Wasp starts over coffee: two women meeting up for the first time since school. Carla is pregnant with her fifth child and smoking her fifth cigarette back-to-back. Heather wraps her cashmere shawl a little tighter and lays out the difficulties she’s had in conceiving.
You think you know what’s coming: a cash-for-child offer that’s both galling and exploitative; a damning indictment of middle-class privilege. Only Morgan Lloyd-Malcolm has other plans in mind. Her two-hander, first seen at Hampstead Downstairs back in February, unfolds into an unexpected potboiler – all plastic ties and ball gags and cold-blooded revenge.
As theatrical gestures go, it’s fantastic. Women don’t often get stories like this. They don’t take out hits or go full Reservoir Dogs on each other. They sip hot drinks and talk babies, right? They fail Bechdel tests and bake. Lloyd-Malcolm’s are fierce and fearsome and taking their lives in their own hands.
The Wasp is a twisty old thing: a petite thriller with one rug pull after another. Each time, you think you’ve got the measure of it, Lloyd-Malcolm gazumps your best guess. Her drip-drip of information is beautifully controlled, even if, inevitably, the about-turns nudge it past the limits of credibility. There are one too many pat conveniences, as these old estranged school friends bungee back into each other’s lives and, in the struggle to keep us up to speed, the writing teeters into exposition. Laura Donnelly‘s Heather recounts their shared history and lays out her intentions in full – the worst excesses of Bond villainy.
That mightn’t be a problem had Tom Attenborough‘s production found the archness in the writing; the knowingness with which Lloyd-Malcolm subverts a typically male genre. It gives rise to some delicate touches – Heather removes a gag with a tissue, so as not to leave a mark on her coffee table – but you wish the situation were played with a little less restraint and a little more mania. If nothing else, it would combat the contrivance.
Yet, all the twists do have a point: they represent the wheel’s turning, so that violence breeds violence and women get back at women. Ultimately, neither Heather nor Carla pauses to hold the patriarchy to account: the philandering husband, the abusive father, the unsupportive partner. They take it out on each other. Each twist changes the play too: Lloyd-Malcolm can have her cake and eat it. As we play out the baby-purchase scenario in our heads.
It’s brilliantly cast. MyAnna Buring bites her lip for as long as possible, holding Carla’s breaking point for as long as possible, while Laura Donnelly morphs, almost imperceptibly, from sweet to psychotic.
The Wasp runs at the Trafalgar Studios until 16 Jan
