Implausible as it sounds, this is the second CERN-and-bereavement drama I’ve seen in as many months. Far from getting jaded with this recondite sub-genre, however, I am full of enthusiasm for Lucy Kirkwood’s disciplined yet ambitious writing, Rufus Norris and designer Katrina Lindsay’s calculatedly spectacular staging and a clutch of magnificent performances led by a brace of top-notch Olivias, namely Williams and Coleman.

The former plays Alice, a physicist working on the massive particle collider outside Geneva and rather neglecting her teenage son; the latter is her younger sister Jenny, floundering through the aftermath of the death of her infant daughter. Over the course of nearly three hours (though it doesn’t seem like it), we realise how emotionally selfish Jenny is, but that Alice is no less wrapped up in her professional drives. A terrific climactic confrontation shortly before the end burns with a superficially noble brutality not unlike the newly crowned King Henry V’s rejection of Falstaff, yet even then and afterwards it becomes ever clearer that this is a fairly evenly matched contest of narcissism and passive-aggression. Meanwhile Joseph Quinn as Alice’s son Luke flails through those difficult years, trying to keep body and soul together through a jungle of peer pressure, exile, revenge porn and a panoramically dysfunctional family... I haven’t yet mentioned grandmother Karen (Amanda Boxer), a fiercely intelligent woman grown even fiercer as she confronts mental and physical decline.

That title works on several levels: the force of a proton collision is described as being like two mosquitoes flying into each other; Alice’s boyfriend is a WHO entomologist trying to combat insect-borne diseases... The symbolism is never spelt out, but we discern some complex of meanings to the effect that these individuals can collide forcefully with each other and can communicate severe afflictions, but in the grand scheme of things are of minuscule importance... or maybe not, as revealed in one of the interpolated commentaries by a character known only as the Boson (perhaps because he gives mass to everything around him?). Kirkwood weaves a fascinatingly intricate net, casts it audaciously wide, and Norris and company (with Colman leading by a nose, unafraid to play such an unsympathetic character) haul in a wealth of dramatic beauties.

Written for the Financial Times.