Olivia Colman is devastatingly good in Lucy Kirkwood’s dazzling … – Telegraph.co.uk

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. Her sister, Jenny (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 longed-for 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: Im Forrest Gump and youre the Wizard of F------ Oz.

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Olivia Colman is devastatingly good in Lucy Kirkwood's dazzling ... - Telegraph.co.uk