Particle physics collides with two lives in freefall
Mosquitoes National’s Dorfman Theatre
Lucy Kirkwood is a playwright who tackles giant themes with a swaggering showmanship. Her 2013 work, Chimerica, meditated on US politics, Tiananmen Square, photojournalism, air pollution and much much more. Now comes Mosquitoes, a tale of sibling rivalry, set against a backdrop of particle physics at CERN. The production, directed by Rufus Norris, sometimes overreaches itself in its seemingly limitless ambition, but it is still a fascinating and provocative work which uses science as a way of questioning our humanity.
Alice (Olivia Williams) is a dazzlingly clever physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider. Jenny, her sister (Olivia Colman), is based in Luton and sells health insurance to women with vaginal cancer. At the start of the play, Jenny is in the late stages of a longedfor pregnancy. Half an hour in and a year or so later, we learn that the baby is dead because her mother has followed some spurious online advice against vaccinating her. The two sisters represent success and failure, rationalism and emotion, perhaps even Remain and Leave. As Jenny tells Alice: “I’m Forrest Gump and you’re the Wizard of ----ing Oz.”
Yet the sisters are not as clear cut as you may think and this is brilliantly articulated by the two actresses. Williams expertly displays an uptightness and exudes an effortless superiority, yet she shows that Alice is aware of the precariousness of her existence (in one scene, it is revealed that, in spite of her world of scientific certainty, she has found faith). Colman, on the other hand, is coruscating in highlighting Jenny’s adroit humour, firing quips like missiles at those who patronise her.
In an interview in The Telegraph on Saturday, Williams said she believed that Colman was not keen on undertaking stage work, but the Broadchurch actress’s performance here is devastatingly good, applying the same emotional heft that has made her such a success on TV.
Williams and Colman are well supported by a cast that includes Joseph Quinn, nervy and mercurial as Alice’s troubled son, Luke, and the great Amanda Boxer, her voice in a state of perpetual querulousness, as the sisters’ mother, herself a scientist who has been denied proper recognition and is now in the early stages of dementia (the rational thought on which she prided herself now cruelly lost).
It is safe to say that you do not need to understand particle physics to appreciate Mosquitoes (the title refers to the force of two mosquitoes hitting each other, like particles colliding), but there are moments when the science becomes overwhelming.
This usually happens when Paul Hilton’s Boson appears at intervals to explain the theoretical side of Alice’s practical research. He sets out thoughts on Chaos Theory and the Big Bang which act as a sort of counterpoint to the sisters’ lives which are in freefall.
Kirkwood stuffs much into two and three quarter hours, arguably too much, but Mosquitoes has much to recommend it – most notably that, for a play about science it is very funny and very sad – often at the same time.