Review: Sydney Theatre Company’s Australian premiere puts the sting in Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes

The Australian premiere of Lucy Kirkwood’s 2017 play Mosquitoes at the Opera House on Friday night was a thrilling emotional ride, cranked to maximum tension by fabulous performances from all on stage.

Left to right: Charles Wu, Jacqueline McKenzie and Mandy McElhinney in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Lucy Kirkwood’s play, Mosquitoes, at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: Daniel Boud

Physics degree not needed to feel sting of Mosquitoes

The Australian premiere of Lucy Kirkwood’s 2017 play Mosquitoes at the Opera House on Friday night was a thrilling emotional ride, cranked to maximum tension by fabulous performances from all on stage.

Mosquitoes is about family dramas of the sort that play out every day in homes across the world.

But the play’s background setting is far from the usual — an experimental scientific institution thought by some to be capable of ending the world.

Alice (Jacqueline McKenzie) is a brilliant young scientist with a big job and a troubled teenage son.

Alice’s sister Jenny (Mandy McElhinney) is slovenly and believes the horoscope. She’s paying a high price for rejecting the science around a major decision she has made.

The women’s mother Karen (Annie Byron) knows how to tighten the screw on her two daughters.

Alice’s son Luke (Charles Wu), is trapped in a country he doesn’t want to live in, and a school he hates.

Throw in Alice’s ineffectual and pompous boyfriend (Louis Seguier), some bad life decisions, towering egos and youthful hormones, and it’s an explosive mixture.

McKenzie and McElhinney were brilliant as the sisters, bound by love and blood but at war over their opposing world views.

Byron shone as Karen, the overbearing retired scientist still berating the world for denying her the Nobel Prize.

Wu gave a visceral performance as the fragile, confused teenager Luke.

Nikita Waldron, as one of Luke’s friends, was both funny and chilling.

Jason Chong as a strangely detached, narrator-like character stiffened the backbone of the entire production.

Altogether an absorbing play carried by the strength of all the performances and the innate quality of Kirkwood’s script.

Mosquitoes is on at the Opera House until May 18.