Review | Mosquitoes at Minerva Theatre, Chichester: Thought provoking - but needed better acting

How can you make an informed opinion when you don’t see the whole thing? But by the interval of Mosquitoes I was contemplating it.

Lucy Kirkwood’s play is marketed as “wildly ambitious”, which I thought sounded ominously euphemistic.

It is a Marmite plot which sees a domestic drama between a son, aunt, mother and grandmother colliding with ruminations on physics and the end of the universe, much like the particles in the Large Hadron Collider which frames the story.

“Wildly ambitious” indeed.

Alice is a scientist working on the collider in Switzerland while raising her troubled teenage son Luke.

Her mentally declining mother Karen was also an accomplished physicist, but her sister Jenny is the black sheep: uneducated, in a low paid job and an antivaxxer responsible for her daughter’s death.

And the pair are coming to visit.

Within the first act, Jenny goes from annoying to downright repulsive: a conspiracy-theorising, bigoted, murderous, whining maelstrom of chaos who attempts suicide after trying to seduce her sister’s boyfriend.

Karen, also, was a rude egomaniac who had about as much pathos as her own soiled knickers.

So when Alice defends Jenny, despite her hideous actions, I found the whole ‘blood is thicker than water’ message impossible to swallow. In fact, I would never have invited them in the first place.

By the end of the first half, after plenty of familial cruelty, eye-rolling moments and a bizarre scene which saw a man writhing on the floor like an A-Level drama student, I was crying out for some redeeming qualities to flesh out these characters.

Thankfully this did come, in the form of Jenny’s relationship with her nephew Luke, who falls victim to revenge porn in one deeply uncomfortable scene.

While showing another side to her, it also lead to one of the most entertainingly uncomfortable moments of the whole show – her reviewing the contents of Luke’s X-rated photo.

By the end, I found the play rather thought provoking, about family and even the meaning of life.

But I cannot help but feel this play would have been improved by better acting.

The role of Jenny is the juiciest of the bunch, but fell somewhat flat in the hands of Faith Turner – who, as an aside, had a head-scratchingly working class accent despite her privileged upbringing.

By contrast, the best actor by a mile was Will Pattle as Luke – perfectly encapsulating the frustration and innocence of the neurologically diverse character.

So having stuck it out, would I see this play again?

Yes, I think I would – but perhaps not this particular production.

Until Saturday, December 2.