Overview
A play about families and particle physics.
Alice is a scientist. She lives in Geneva. As the Large Hadron Collider starts up in 2008, she is embarking on the most exciting work of her life, searching for the Higgs Boson particle. Jenny is her sister. She lives in Luton. She spends a lot of time Googling. When tragedy throws them together, the collision threatens them all with chaos.
Lucy Kirkwood's play Mosquitoes premiered at the National Theatre, London, in July 2017, in a production featuring Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams, and directed by Rufus Norris.
'Fascinating… Lucy Kirkwood is a dramatist of dauntless ambition' Guardian
'This is the kind of play that makes me want to punch the air in celebration - it exudes as much energy as the protons pinging around the Large Hadron Collider… Lucy Kirkwood's real triumph here is to combine the thoughtful enquiry and large themes that marked her previous hit, the award-winning Chimerica, with a portrait of a dysfunctional family that exerts its own gravitational pull. The result is emotionally involving as well as intellectually satisfying… ranges from profoundly funny to deeply moving' WhatsOnStage
'A fascinating and provocative work which uses science as a way of questioning our humanity… Lucy Kirkwood is a playwright who tackles giant themes with a swaggering showmanship' Telegraph
'Wildly ambitious, often very funny… a drama of huge ideas – the need for logic and irrationality, faith and science, to co-exist together; the idea of love as a physical bond to the universe' Time Out
'An idea-stuffed, intelligent play… Kirkwood is a writer of reach, intelligence and ambition. There’s a hunger to her work, an urge to fill her plays to brim. She knows how to spring-load a joke and can write lines of total emotional devastation' The Stage
'A mighty new play… hugely ambitious, intelligent and affecting, and a refreshing epic powered by two women who contain multitudes' Broadway World
'Intelligent, impassioned… examines existence through both ends of the telescope, swinging wildly between micro and macro, and injecting huge questions about science and faith, the rational and the emotional into a tough, tender family drama… exhilarating in its ambition' The Times