Mosquitoes, theatre review: Olivia Colman is a triumph but science sister act misfires

Let’s start by listing the best things about Mosquitoes, a new play by that admirably bold and ambitious dramatist Lucy Kirkwood, of Chimerica fame. It is, unfortunately, a very short list comprising just two words: Olivia Colman. Colman, unstoppable star of screens large and small, is a perpetual triumph in this misfiring look at two very different sisters, generating what little warmth, light and humour the evening has to offer.

There’s a trend in drama of late to use the Large Hadron Collider as a metaphor for, well, big and difficult and important things. There’s more, much more, of this here, as Alice (Olivia Williams) is an experimental physicist living in Geneva and working towards the great switch-on of the LHC. Her sister Jenny (Colman) lives in Luton, dramatic shorthand for the back of beyond, and has a very ordinary life. Apart from the fact that her young daughter has just died because Jenny refused to let her have the MMR vaccine.

So here the siblings are in Geneva, along with their mother who has incipient dementia and Luke (Joseph Quinn), Alice’s highly strung loner of a teenage son who is involved in cyber hacks and sexting, and everyone is colliding away like angry particles in a you-know-what.

There’s also that superlative stage actor Paul Hilton bounding about in a lab-coat as a peculiar character called The Boson, who may well represent Luke’s mentally ill father, but seems an over-eager cross between Brian Cox and Doctor Who, spouting large chunks of science from which it is all too easy to switch off.

The science sections in Rufus Norris’s centrifugal production feel very boggy and bolted on to the family drama, which in turn resembles nothing so much as Eastenders Goes to CERN, so many times do Alice and Jenny argue and make up and then threaten never to speak again. Still, at least the family segments mean we get Colman, a spinning top of grief and humour and anger and destruction, both of self and others.

Until Sept 28, National Theatre; nationaltheatre.org.uk