Published 24th Mar 2025, 10:08 BST

Wasps, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★

The Land That Never Was, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★

A couple of weeks ago, the spring Play, Pie and Pint season at Oran Mor and the Traverse offered us Kev Campbell Was He, a terrific rite-of-passage monologue by Alexander Tait about a young Glasgow man finding his way towards a different kind of life.

And now, here comes another monologue, Wasps - written by Cameron Forbes, brilliantly performed by RCS graduate Yolanda Mitchell - that could be its female companion piece; a tale in which young Rianne, making her way through secondary school in Glasgow, faces the toughest of transitions when her single mother becomes terminally ill.

It’s true that Cameron Forbes’s play is not about wasps, although Rianne meets a few as she goes along, nor about the recent frightening decline in the wasp population; and Rianne is forced to change by tragic circumstances, while Kev is driven to it by his own creativity.

If the outline of the story is a shade passive and conventional, though, the detail leaves us in no doubt that both Rianne and her mother, a hard-working, hard-smoking nurse, are remarkable women, sassy, sweary, and prepared to take nonsense from no one.

In the course of the play, Mitchell plays not only Rianne’s tremendously vivid self, but her mother, her dodgy best friend who disappears every time she gets a better offer, her school guidance teacher, a bloke in her class that she fancies, and other assorted figures. And together, in Lesley Hart’s razor-sharp production, this rich gallery of characters propel us through a brutally frank and absolutely memorable monologue about a young woman facing tragedy in her own way, first with denial, then with a desperate and defiant courage, then finally with a new wisdom.

The writing is brilliantly clear and vivid throughout; and as for the wasps - well, they are up there in the attic of Rianne’s house, a metaphor for the fact that life stings us sometimes; and for the truth that those painful experience are part a whole ecosystem of life, death and rebirth, without which we would be nowhere at all.

As Rianne learns the hard way, hope for the future can be a fragile thing, caught somewhere between essential vision and dangerous deception.

Liam Rees’s fascinating oner-hour solo show The Land That Never Was offers a thoughtful if slightly fragmented reflection on that use and abuse of hope - and of dreams - in the world of politics and finance, not to mention his own brief career as an Edinburgh tour guide.

The show is inspired by the bizarre career of 19th century Scottish con-man Gregor McGregor, who in 1820 declared himself the king of an imaginary south American kingdom called Poyais, and not only persuaded hundreds of gullible souls to invest in it as part of the great colonial boom, but actually sent two shiploads of would-be settlers to their deaths, on a dank Central American shore.

In a brief hour, Rees uses McGregor’s story as a starting point for various meditations on the point at which hopeful narratives become outright lies, and on what happens when an impulse to tell people what they want to hear becomes outright and self-deserving deception.

There are entertaining episodes of audience participation; and also some sharp-edged questions about whether we think, as citizens and voters today, that a better future is possible.

And although Rees’s show has its charms, it seems to me that it might deliver a more vivid experience if it focussed in more detail on that question; and on the hopes that McGregor was manipulating, with his vision of Poyais, and on how, in our frightening times, we can find a reasonable balance between hope and cynicism, vision and truth, when it comes to facing the future.

Wasps is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 25-29 March. The Land That Never Was, run ended.

Theatre reviews: Wasps | The Land That Never Was

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