Review: The Wasp Fails to Sting at Southwark Playhouse
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- Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's 2015 revenge drama "The Wasp" is currently staged at Southwark Playhouse under director James Haddrell, with Cassandra Hercules as Heather and Serin Ibrahim as Carla.
- The play reverses the power dynamic: Heather is now a wealthy professional firing "sly broadsides," while her former bully Carla struggles with poverty, a fifth pregnancy, and an unhappy partnership.
- The review criticizes the production for plot twists that lack believability or genuine jeopardy, with a stilted first act ending prematurely and a second half "written in a different mode" to the stylised first.
- Non-naturalistic elements — scene replays from different angles and waspish buzzing during dangerous moments — disappear after the interval, leaving the two halves feeling detached.
- Beneath the plotting, the play raises serious questions about the lifelong mark childhood tormentors leave, class and privilege dynamics, and whether the bullied can ever find catharsis through revenge.
- A tarantula hawk wasp metaphor — an insect that consumes its victims from within — is flagged as applicable to either the bully's violence or the bullied's self-consuming anger.
- As a revenge thriller with Hitchcockian aspirations, the production is called original but ultimately found to "lack enough of a killer sting."
Why it matters: The review identifies a gap between the play's thematic ambition — hard questions about bullying, class, and catharsis — and the production's execution, which buries those questions under busy, unmotivated plotting. For theatregoers considering tickets, the verdict suggests Southwark Playhouse's staging does not deliver on the script's Hitchcockian promise, and the tonal split between acts is the production's defining flaw.
