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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Ted McGowan as Luke and Ruth Herd as Alice Pictures: Richard Smith Photography Mosquitoes The Loft Theatre, Leamington Spa ***** Does Mosquitoes have in a sense a double meaning. Conceivably. The play has as its background the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) based at the CERN laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, a twenty-seven-kilometer underground ring which accelerates particles, like protons, to nearly the speed of light, then collides them with other protons, and strives to find explanations for the earth's origins; and the massive related Higgs Boson, envisioned in the 1960s and conclusively discovered in 2012. Though supposedly so, the play is not really about science, but more significantly, about two sisters, Alice and Jenny, mosquitoes (?) who battle and reconcile; serene Alice is involved with the Collider experiment - and its brilliantly successful conclusion. mischievous Jenny has no such international distinction, being domesticated, but extremely feisty. It's their relationship, not science, which forms the main thrust of Lucy Kirkwood's play. Launched at the National Theatre, it starred Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams, and was hugely praised. Actually the script is more humdrum, less outstanding than that, but right from the first scene the Loft typically produced a vastly impressive staging, with the intellectual Alice (Ruth Herd) sympathetic and supportive, and her vexatious sister Jenny (Leonie Frazier) fretful, hypermanic and contradictory, having lost a baby (mainly due to unsubstantiated stories about the MMR vaccine) as well as obliged to look after their increasingly confused mother, who herself has a historic scientific history and is endlessly obsessed and repetitive about it. One success - possibly relevant - of the play (and certainly not its appalling overuse of 'fuck' and 'fuckings') is the intensity of its twenty-odd scenes that are forceful duets: i.e. feature just exchanges and encounters between two characters. From the outset in Viki Betts' finely honed production we meet Alice and Jenny, the latter of whom unexpectedly transforms into marked sensitivity and insight as the pair develop.
Leonie Frazier as Jenny and Christopher Bird as Henri. Alice - Herd plays it, rightly, as long-suffering, patient, unbelievably tolerant - is, till their explosive scene (easily one of the Loft's best) at the close, fairly benign, even passive; Frazier's Jenny is a brilliant creation: head, hair-tweaking, shoulders, knees, insupressible sparky gestures - she is endlessly highly strung, excitable, provocative, wrought up, on tentahooks. Splendidly spoken, a treat from start to end. Another really impressive personality here was Natalie (Alice Arthur): pushy, assertive, unyielding, laid back, plus endlessly domineering. And sexy. This was another exhilating performance: at times Arthur's brilliance almost stole the show. Her frequently changing costumes (Wardrobe: Helen Brady), including outrageous pinks, were the most eye-catching, irrepressible and apt. The schoolboy Luke, Alice's fraught, headphone-obsessed son (Ted McGowan), whom in one of the relatively few genuinely comic scenes Natalie nearly seduces, is shy, nervous (though in fact clever), up tight about 'The Earth is over-populated', the impact of famine; ways it might all end; the fatal effect of viruses and pandemics, and so on: fairly frozen in stance and perhaps a margin older-looking than his supposed seventeen, and we gather previously drawn into a bitter fight. Luke too engages in several two-parters (e.g. with a by then warm-hearted, consoling Jenny). Other roles shone too: Christopher Bird as Henri, the francophone Swiss, excellently accented, dubbed 'boring' but who shows marked sympathy and support where it is needed; and in a splendid vignette, Joanne Barnes as the fiercely, even aggressively enunciated Italian Gavriella Bastianelli; a bit-part, but a deliciously delivered one. The science, so far as it ran, came from two roles. Sue Moore as the two girls' mother, Karen, obsessed, doubtless with reason, with her perceived capability of achieving a Nobel Prize many years ago ('Treasurer of the Royal Society', etc.), breaks into a riveting soliloquy (there are only a few such in the play), Moore as always on excellent, engaging, masterly form, lending a particularly serious element to the text 'the greatest force in the cosmos and gravity'. She also provides a nicely turned measure of comedy 'I can still menstruate'; weeing herself; 'I've always preferred the company of men'; crazily spanks her grown daughter.
Chris Gilbey-Smith as Boson The other intensely scientific one is 'Boson', a personification as it were, certainly an explainer, of the Higgs Boson's dramatic collision, giving us a feast of information about scientific progress. This was the superbly enunciated, crystal clear frontstage presentations by Chris Gilbey-Smith, who took over the role at the last minute. It doesn't work first time round: 'This time we're going to get it right'. And it does. Constant moving of triangular flats (Richard Moore's set, so often inspiring) seemed fairly pointless. What did impress and give pleasure most was the staggeringly impressive, ingeniously computed rearstage projections designed by by Joel Hassell and the multicoloured lighting designs, all managed by by the endlessly inventive Dave Barclay. These vivid, compelling cyclorama creations - especially in Part II, where a sequence of massive visual effects, one virtually like the sun exploding - did more than anything to lead us into an explosive scientific atmosphere. The effect was resplendent and dazzling in the extreme. So - were we treated to a top quality stagework, and did Kirkwood's script achieve the brilliance and high jinks it has been acclaimed for? Perhaps not. More important was the Loft cast's teamwork, and their crucial, capable handling by Viki Betts. The ability of the Loft to turn any play into an intense, fine-tuned, involving and even gripping presentation remains undoubted. If Mosquitoes made an impact, it was thanks to the quality of this company's - every time a close-knit team's - first-rate delivery. To 28-09-24. Roderic Dunnett 18-09-24 *For those interested, you can find out about Higgs Boson, The God Particle, here . . . good luck. Apparently the entire universe would collapse if it didn't exist . . . |
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