Written in the wake of Brexit, and steeped in a moment when distrust of experts seems frighteningly de rigueur, Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes buzzes with big questions about science, belief and calamitous barriers to communication and understanding. The third of Kirkwood’s plays to be staged by Sydney Theatre Company, these concerns are explored through the unassuming prism of the domestic family drama, as in last year’s post-apocalyptic The Children.

Jacqueline McKenzie and Mandy McElhinney in Sydney Theatre Company’s Mosquitoes. Photo © Daniel Boud

It’s 2008, and Alice (Jacqueline McKenzie) is a physicist on the verge of discovering the Higgs boson particle. Life seems just peachy, until her sloppy, bereaved sister Jenny (Mandy McElhinney) turns up on her Geneva doorstep with their mother Karen (Annie Byron) in tow. Having fallen victim to the fearmongering around vaccination, Jenny has recently lost her baby daughter to the measles, taken as the latest example of her “epically thick” character. It’s a sentiment expressed by Alice, shared by her teenage son Luke (a committed Charles Wu) and emphatically echoed by Karen, herself once a Nobel Prize-worthy scientist. But dig a little deeper and you see that it...