The Wasp at Trafalgar Studios, SW1

reviewed for The Times, 17 December 2015

 

At school, for just one year, Carla and Heather were friends. From year eight, however, Carla’s gang of fellow chavs made posh little Heather’s life hell.

After school, it’s class, not cool, that counts, and when Heather seeks out her teenage tormenter 20 years later, she knows she’s come out on top. Raddled Carla (MyAnna Buring) chain-smokes her way through her fifth pregnancy, working shifts in Morrisons. The cashmere-clad Heather (Laura Donnelly) can tempt her with the kind of cash to change her life. However, does she crave Carla’s friendship, envy her fertility or simply hanker after revenge?

In its West End transfer from the Hampstead Theatre, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s thriller benefits from Tom Attenborough’s fastidious direction, and where the plot wanders it’s anchored in two nuclear-strength performances. Buring’s Carla bleeds flinty disappointment; she would seem desiccated if she weren’t so bloody fertile. Donnelly seems less comfortable at first but as Heather reveals more of herself we’re inexorably drawn to her steel-brittle determination.

Sure, there are plot holes so gaping they might swallow a Stagecoach double-decker. Lloyd Malcolm never quite takes us with her through every twist of her text. Her title also feels contrived, from an analogy shoehorned in amid portents of horror and gloom.

However, Attenborough’s eye for detail lifts a shoddy thriller into a short, tight portrayal of femininity and class: Buring shoving free sugar packets into her pockets at Donnelly’s chichi choice of café becomes bleakly heartbreaking.

Lloyd Malcolm is witty, too, on the absurdities of a Facebook generation now into its thirties. David Woodhead’s design is cold, bright and darkly efficient. And while The Wasp is deeply conservative in its vision of female fulfilment (it’s all about our ovaries), there’s something sharp in its tail. In the hands of the latest sprig off the Attenborough tree, it gets the best possible hearing.