Trigger warnings are useful, but their starkness can do a play an injustice. This week’s A Play, A Pie, and Pint‘s show Wasps comes with a warning about cancer, parental illness, and strong language, which could give the impression that the audience are in for an unbearably harrowing slide into pain and grief. Instead, they get a warm, gutsy comedy-drama with wise things to say about growing up and moving on. 

Performed as a monologue, it centres on Rianne (Yolanda Mitchell), a schoolgirl with a crush on a boy that veers from adoring to ambivalent to mortifying in the way of first crushes. Her best friend is more deeply involved with a boy Rianne dislikes but puts up with, and her days at school are filled with the kind of trivial incidents that are high stakes, life-or-death situations for teenagers. Her most pressing problem is her phobia for wasps, which manifests as a fixation on all aspects of their lives, before becoming a way of processing her mother’s sudden illness. 

The wasps are ingeniously woven into the script by Cameron Forbes. They are villains who sneak up and sting, teenage louts on a drunken rampage, and traumatised evictees searching for new homes. Their attacks are comical and terrifying, they are objects of existential dread and fellow hostages of fortune. As characters and metaphors, these insects embody flawed humanity. Their plight highlights the wonder and fragility of life, the way we clash with and depend upon each other, and the unchanging inevitability of change. 

Gillian Argo’s elegant design perfectly captures that sense of solidity and vulnerability. A chair represents the school, and Rianne’s bedroom is a small hive made of wood and fabric. Unaware, she nestles inside her worst nightmare while searching for wasps online, as if they were a distant hazard she could prepare for. Just as nothing can stop night following day, nothing can stop ageing, illness, and death. One day school will be a memory, everyone we love will die, and no amount of videos can make it stop.  

Despite that melancholic realisation, Wasps is overwhelmingly in favour of making the most of the time we have. We may not be immortal, but we are here. We have friends and calamities that are important to us, and that is enough. Under the sharp direction of Lesley Hart, Mitchell commands the stage, making each character so vivid that it never feels as if she is alone. Her energy and clarity makes it easy to understand the plot, something that can get lost in a monologue, and her comic timing is flawless.