Theatre review: Mosquitoes

After the success of Chimerica, Lucy Kirkwood’s latest play Mosquitoes gets its premiere at the National Theatre, with Rufus Norris directing, a Katrina Lindsay set full of bells and whistles and spectacular projections, and most of all the central roles filled by two Future Dame Olivias: Williams plays Alice, a particle physicist working at CERN in the buildup to the Large Hadron Collider being switched on for the first time. Colman is her sister Jenny, the black sheep in a family full of scientists, as she’s superstitious and much more likely to believe any unfounded rumour she reads online than empirically proven facts. In particular, she believed the scare stories about the MMR vaccine causing autism and refused to vaccinate her baby daughter, with tragic results that kick off the story: In need of some support Jenny is visiting her sister in Switzerland, along with their mother Karen (Amanda Boxer.)

Theatre review: Wish List

For the second year the Royal Court partners with the Royal Exchange in Manchester to stage a Bruntwood Prize winner, and following last year's Yen there's another kitchen sink drama looking at an easily ignored class, whose every last lifeline the current government's all too gleefully eager to cut. Tamsin (Erin Doherty) and her brother Dean (Joseph Quinn) had fairly promising and ordinary lives ahead of them until their mother's death, which led Tamsin to neglect her education and Dean's mild OCD to turn into a completely debilitating condition: He's fixated with all food and drink being scalding hot and has a system of knocking on wood to get him through the day, but his most obsessive ritual is constantly washing and styling his hair. He can barely dress himself let alone work, so it's down to Tamsin to support them both (their father is never mentioned,) but with no qualifications all she can find is a zero-hours contract packing goods for NOT AMAZON DEFINITELY NOT AMAZON.

Theatre review: Deathwatch

The Print Room has now opened what is presumably going to be its main house in the former Coronet cinema: It's what would have been the balcony, with a new floor put in, and the original stalls converted into a bar (the design of which has really embraced the "serial killer's lair" theme of a building with dolls nailed to the bathroom doors.) The fact that the theatre's surroundings are the dilapidated red walls of an old cinema, meanwhile, is a theme that Lee Newby's design has run with, turning the pit into a circus-like stage, with a cage in the middle of the sawdust. It's people, not tigers we'll be watching perform as Geraldine Alexander directs Deathwatch, Jean Genet's play inspired by his own time in prison. The cell is shared by three men and, as the play opens, Lefranc (Danny Lee Wynter) is trying to throttle his cellmate Maurice (Joseph Quinn.)

Theatre review: Love, Love, Love

MY STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Although I don't review actual amateur dramatics, I hope that drama school productions would appreciate a genuine outside view, and try to review accordingly.

To continue a bit of a Mike Bartlett theme to the year so far, a LAMDA production of his play following the lives of the Baby Boomers, and challenging their mantra that all you need is Love, Love, Love. The first act takes place in 1967, when Kenneth (Joseph Quinn) meets Sandra (Ellie Morris) while she's dating his brother Henry (Nathan Hamilton,) whom she promptly ditches for him. They end up married, apparently happily, but on the night in 1990 when their daughter Rose (Joanna Nicks) turns 16, tensions in their marriage erupt and, in front of the kids, it breaks down quickly and spectacularly. The final act takes us to the consequences in 2011 as Rose, raised on idealistic promises that everything will be all right if she follows her dreams, finally accepts that this was never true. Adulthood has so far defeated their son Jamie (Max Harrison,) meanwhile, that he's withdrawn into a pot-dazed, permanent childhood.