Photos: Robert Piwko

Mosquitoes, which premiered at National Theatre in 2017, is a very busy play. In nearly three hours of relentless intensity we ricochet from parenting to sorority to bereavement to dementia, intimate teenage images shared online and complex physics among many other side issues. It’s all a bit indigestible and given the wealth and breadth of material might have been better as two or even three plays.

Nonetheless this potentially difficult piece is in competent hands  with director Anna Jones and her cast of nine. The central plot presents two sisters, Jenny (Emily Carmichael) and Alice (Rachel Bottomley) daughters of a retired high achieving scientist, Karen (Amanda Waggot – nice performance). Alice is a successful scientist working on the Hadron Collider in Geneva with a troubled teenaged son Luke (Andrew Mortimer). In contrast Jenny is a smoking, drinking low achiever desperate for a child. There is a powerful love/hate relationship between them, predicated on undercurrents of jealousy, admiration and shared background.

Jenny is a huge and meaty role and Emily Carmichael is a fine, intelligent actor who makes her character by turns mercurial, changeable, distraught and funny. She’s also more practical than her sister. Jenny may only be selling medical insurance for a living but she cares for their declining mother and understands her nephew’s problems better than his mother does. It’s a nuanced performance and I really like the way Carmichael listens and speaks with her eyes.

Rachel Bothamley gives us an engaging contrast as the patronising Alice, devoted to her work but struggling in her personal life. There are a lot of tears and angst and one feels really sorry for her ever-decent boyfriend Henri (James Johnston – good) who, in the end can’t cope with it.

There is a problem, though with staging in the round and I’ve not seen Tower Theatre configured in this way before. It works neatly enough in the space but, inevitably some of the dialogue is delivered facing away from most of the audience. And when the text is as wordy and visceral as this the tendency is to hit if fast and furious in order to be naturalistic. In this production that quite often creates an audibility problem, particularly with Mortimer – otherwise a strong and interesting actor. However convincingly you say the words if the audience can’t hear them clearly there’s a communication lapse.

I do understand that a non-professional company does not have access to the breadth of casting opportunities that a professional one does but it is a bit odd when it eventually becomes clear (sort of) that Luke’s friend Nathalie (Bella Hornby – good actor) is meant to be Indian. Suddenly, three quarters of the way through the play she mentions racism – yet another issue! – and you think “What?”.

The play is mostly set during the famous Higgs boson breakthrough and we get two long soliloquies from Luke Owen as “The Boson”. Leaving aside the thought that his science, speculation and observations may belong in a different play, Owen is very good indeed. He commands the stage with apparent insouciance, tempered with huge assertions about the end of the world, eyes darting and hands expressive. I’d be quite happy to see him do a 60 minute one man play, sometime.

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  All photos: Robert Piwko

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