About the work
Mosquitoes is a play by the British playwright Lucy Kirkwood, whose work on it was supported by a commissioning grant from the Manhattan Theatre Club. Rufus Norris directed the premiere at the National Theatre in London: after previews from 18 July 2017, it opened in the Dorfman Theatre on 25 July 2017, with Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams as the two sisters.
Plot
Physicist Alice works on CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, while her sister Jenny lives in Luton, distrusts conventional medicine, refuses to vaccinate her baby and loses it. In 2008, as the particle accelerator is switched on, the two clash in Geneva, along with Alice's teenage son Luke and their mother Karen, whose memory is failing. A mysterious narrator figure called The Boson inserts reflections on physics between the scenes and finally offers a glimpse of the future.
Cultural significance
Kirkwood mirrors family conflict in images drawn from particle physics and sets rational thinking against gut feeling, belief and half-knowledge picked up online. The German translation is by Corinna Brocher; the first German-language production, directed by Thomas Bockelmann, opened at the Staatstheater Kassel on 30 August 2018.