Mosquitoes-National theatre

Given Colman's status as National Treasure, maybe a TV adaptation like London Road or Charles III?

People in a cinema watching people cleaning an empty cinema! 

In a way I think its hyper naturalism and extended silences might have made it more of a difficult watch on screen, though, where we are conditioned to expect more action and changing visuals.

The play text was finally delivered by Amazon today. Will give it a read as I'm refreshing NT site for tickets on 26th September.

 Already gone. Hope someone here managed to nab it.

Couple just up now for September

There are plenty of £7.50 Entry Pass (NT's 16-25 ticket scheme) tickets available. Maybe they accidentally got released to the general public for a short period?

Last night was my first trip to the Dorfman (never went when it was the Cottesloe either) and it did not disappoint. This play is excellent. I've never seen any of Kirkwood's work before, but her writing was impeccable. The family drama aspects of the play are grounded and touching - never melodramatic or straying into soap opera territory. For someone who calls himself a scientist, the accompanying commentary on communication and scientific endeavours was eye-opening and made me examine my own attitudes towards such things. The articles in the programme are also very well written - I know a lot of scientists who need to be reminded of the themes they discuss.

Now, I don't study particle physics but I take an interest in it and have followed the studies that are being performed at CERN (I remember listening on the radio the day they turned the LHC on), so I was already familiar with almost all of the science that was mentioned in the play. I found that the interludes delivered by 'The Boson' were odd at first, but once I saw the parallels that Kirkwood was trying to make I actually thought they were quite clever. However, I would be interested to know how easy it is to understand for someone who isn't familiar with the science - the explanations seemed to be pitched at the right level, but it's always easy to say that when you've heard it all before. Given that one of the statements that Kirkwood is trying to make is about accessibility and communication of scientific information, I'd like to know if she's managed to achieve an appropriate level of communication in her own writing.

I don't think anyone will be surprised to hear me say that Olivia Colman is amazing. She deserves every ounce of praise that is sent her way, because her performance here is remarkable. Both Olivia Williams and Amanda Boxer also give fantastic performances with their characters who are imperfect in a very different way to Colman's, but to take a troubled character like that and make her so real and believable is very impressive. It reminds me of Denise Gough's performance in Angels.

Kudos to Rufus Norris for doing a production in the round so effectively - too often I've seen blocking that just looks unnatural, but here Norris has made every scene flow smoothly and naturally so that it can play to every side of the auditorium. I also disagree with those who were calling for the play to be cut down - 2hrs 50mins flew by for me, and I loved every word of it. I'm feeling very lucky right now that I've had the privilege of seeing both this and Angels - I feel like I should raise a glass to whoever started the Entry Pass scheme.

This is why I love theatre and personal opinions/ reactions to theatre because I could not disagree more with any of what has been said above

I'm not sure - I enjoyed the play and hope to see it again, having read the text, but in performance I would have liked more time to digest the emotionally heavy domestic scenes before the barrage of the cosmic bits. I've seen Escaped Alone and Life of Galileo this year, both of which had similar scenes, and saw the play in preview deliberately not wanting to know too much about it - I like to see if a play can stand on its own two feet without backup. My general feeling was that I liked the Boson parts - though they got a bit long-winded - but was less keen on the TV launch (the Kay Burleyesque reporter was a bit cliche'd) and other digressions: I thought the old mother's Nobel prize/womanising husband backstory was another distracting complication to an already very busy plot, and wasn't convinced by the surprisingly uptight Quaker entomologist boyfriend cafe scene lobbing yet more themes into the mix (aren't Quakers supposed to be more mellow and empathetic?).

I wonder if my approach would have differed had I not seen Escaped Alone and Galileo this year: I enjoyed the play, but the people I saw it with thought it was a mess. 

In my opinion (and I have many about this production) the script and writing was by far the weakest link. I would have maybe liked it more if it felt like the author (whose previous plays I liked lots) had not written a bog standard and fairly unbelievable family drama, thought it wasn't exciting or different enough and crow-barred science elements into it and tried to make innocuous parallels between the two. I don't think I would have preferred either as a full play but I certainly didn't like the amateurish mess (that felt like it was written by a brattish teenager who had big ideas about the world and our place in it) that was presented on that stage.

Well. I really had no clue what was really going on with all the sciencey bits to be perfectly frank although the staging was rather fancy what with the giant doughnut flying about all over the place and the lights and such. It was a little bit like when you're with someone who is proudly pointing out all the names and shapes of the constellations and try as you might you just can't see it so you just fake it, "Ooooh yes, how marvellous. Yes, it looks exactly like a plough. Almost as though there should be a horse in front of it". It seems to keep them happy.

Apart from those bits, there's a lot going on. Probably a bit too much really. It's like 6 weeks of Emmerdale all squeezed into 3 hours but it all zips by nicely. The cast are great on the whole, Joseph Quinn in particular is very good and although at first he seems a bit too old to be the teenager you forget it pretty quickly. I wasn't convinced by Amanda Boxer as the doddery old lady to be honest. Despite telling us how many degrees she had I didn't quite believe that she was the second Marie Curie.

But oh, Dame Olivia Colman. She is incandescent. She makes the ordinary extraordinary and she waltzes off with this with absolute ease. An Olivier for Olivia please. She's so natural and the way in which she can just cry like that is heartbreaking. She needs to be my best friend.

Oh and the line, "I'm not asking you out. I'm not Barbara Windsor" made me laugh for ages.