Sydney Reviews

With a title The Wasp you’d be expecting a sting in the tale.

In Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play there are several stings delivered in pin prick dialogue and biting situation.

A two hander in three acts, The Wasp is a dramatic psychological pretzel fabricated with fright, a genuinely arresting hundred minutes of percolating manipulation motivated by slights past and present and an audacious ambition to bring those slights to right.

Heather and Carla haven’t seen each other since school. Their lives have taken very different paths. Carla has been popping out sprog since finishing school and has her fifth on the way. Heather is well-to-do, married, childless, with a beautiful home.

And yet, at Heather’s instigation, we find them in a café having tea and making awkward conversation. Until Heather presents Carla with a bag containing a significant stash of cash and an unexpected proposition.

Symbolic of the play and a major prop and set decoration is the Tarantula Hawk, which sounds like an arachnid avian but is in fact a particular member of the wasp species. Apparently, it stings and paralyses the spider then lays an egg on it and burrows in, grows feeding off its insides, avoiding the major organs. A sort of role reversal in the usual spider and the fly playbook.

Parasitism pervades the anatomy of the play, along with examinations of the primal – can nurture override nature, are we chained to biology, is bullying and violence part of our DNA, and can prevailing chains and cycles be broken?

Jessica Bell as Carla and Cara Whitehouse as Heather give thrilling fully fledged performances as the two former schoolmates whose moral compasses have been interfered with to the point of reversed polarity leading to a perverse reality of plotting and scheming.

Directed by Becks Blake, the production boasts a splendid lighting design by Martin Kinnane and effective and efficient production design by Axel Hinkley.

The sound design however is superfluous and distracting, gilding the lily of the play’s lithe linguistics and competing with its pungent and dynamic delivery.

Every word written, every word spoken in The Wasp deserves to be heard.