Mosquitoes review - Feel life's deep forces at Leamington theatre

Mosquitoes is a play about disintegration and cohesion. It’s about immeasurable forces that hold the universe together and threaten to tear it apart and which are driving it who knows where; likewise, the forces that affect our deepest relationships with each other. It has its feet firmly on the ground while at the same time trying to explain the inscrutable universe, if not the why of everything then at least the how.

Alice (Ruth Herd) is a scientist, working on the most expensive, the most complex machine ever created, the Large Hadron Collider, which sought to find the Higgs boson particle, the so-called God particle, thought to contain the secrets of the universe, to those who can understand it. Alice is clever, one of an intellectual elite, whose mother Karen (Sue Moore) is of the same stock. They live in a world of very clever people who live by reason, or think they do. Her teenage son Luke (Ted McGowan) is also clever, a bit of a nerd, unhappy at school where he is mocked with disastrous results by his less clever classmates. Alice’s sister, Jenny (Leonie Frazier), however, is not clever. In fact, she is stupid, or at least that is what her family often tell her. Actually, she’s no more than ordinarily bright, but in the rarified world of super-smart physicists, that doesn’t count for much. Jenny smokes and drinks while pregnant and refuses to give her baby the MMR vaccine because she believes the anti-vaccine stories she has read on the internet. Jenny defies reason in her actions and emotions, and thus goes against the rules of her family, and tragedy follows.

Lucy Kirkwood’s play features many of the cream of the Loft’s regular actors, who give some stellar performances throughout. Particularly moving are Ted McGowan as the bullied child, and Leonie Frazier as Jenny, who in the end holds the family together. Sue Moore’s indomitable mother is a force of nature in herself yet faces the end of her own universe as she ages and her faculties decline. Likewise, Ruth Herd as Alice, whose intellect is her weakness and almost her downfall. They each in their way give their characters dignity and courage in the face of inscrutable nature.

Until September 28. Visit lofttheatrecompany.com or call 01926 830680 to book.