What if God spoke to one of the billionaire pioneers of world-changing technologies and began to guide their hand? That’s the elevator pitch for writer Christopher Shinn’s play Against, currently at London’s Almeida Theatre, where Ben Whishaw takes on the familiar figure of the socially awkward tech-genius, the Silicon Valley success story, as he faces a crisis.

Whishaw plays Luke, a sort of composite of Tesla boss Elon Musk and Facebook king Mark Zuckerberg. The character has made his living through a private space programme, through transportation and communications, and the world is his toy box as he celebrates the successful launch of his latest orbital rocket.

And then he hears the voice – not a physical voice, but more of a feeling reverberating through his body, a feeling with a message: “Go where there is violence.” This sends Luke on a quest to discover what violence truly is, by arriving in towns in the aftermath of violent disasters or tragedies, asking questions and staying after “the others have left” in search of more than just a sound bite for a news cycle.

At first he’s like a modern-day Truman Capote gathering fodder for In Cold Blood, as he records the interviews for a website, listening to victims and perpetrators alike. Quickly, though, Luke morphs into a living social network through which opinions pour and rage, a conduit for greater connectivity in the aftermath of violent action, opening up spaces for conversations and platforming political dissent.

But soon his openness sees him shift from local salve for local pain into a national sensation, and his quiet mission raises him up to the status of guru, or even Christ-like leader.

A world without Facebook?

Against is an ambitious undertaking for Shinn, and one that comes unstuck fairly early. The promise in his idea is both the referential scope, the ability to traverse such huge swathes of contemporary experience, from high-school shooting to campus rape culture, as well as the pertinence to violence in the age of social media.

On the first count, the play simply comes undone by trying to do and say too much. As Luke flits from campus to classroom, from the bedsit of drug addicts to the outskirts of a prison or the endless corridors of an Amazon-like warehouse, the message is diluted rather than refined. And that message, which Shinn never quite delivers clearly enough, is that violence is inherent in all the systems that power 21st-century neoliberal capitalism.

Likewise, the portrait of modern America, or modern society in general, never comes fully into focus. In particular, and most bizarrely given the way Luke develops, the role of social media in shaping the news cycle and mediating cataclysmic events, is never raised. It’s almost as if Against exists in a world before Facebook, or without it.

Against also sees Shinn take a number of lazy pot-shots at the modern left, identity politics and modern relationships. For example, a subplot involving a liberal arts professor and an impressionable young girl in a polyamorous set-up may well have been intended as a criticism of call-out culture, but in fact serves little purpose other than to enable one character to take ill-considered and frankly callous pot-shots at another.

It’s really only when the narrative sticks tightly to Luke and his quest that Against makes any impact. Whishaw is tremendous, the faintest flicker of social awkwardness, great intelligence and a ferocious sense of purpose.

The direction from Ian Rickson is only intermittently notable, and the lengthy play glides over designer Ultz’s laminate-floored set so smoothly there’s barely a snag or wrinkle to provoke interest.

For all the promise of its concept, and for the timeliness of a parable about a man who takes a stand against an increasingly violent world, Shinn’s play spends so long thrashing out what it stands against, and negotiating a problematic path through clichĂ©, it never quite works out what it’s for.

is at the Almeida Theatre, London, until 30 September

Every time a beam is fired around the 26.659 kilometres of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, trillions of protons shoot towards one another, creating over 600 million collisions every second. The numbers are so large they can induce a kind of vertigo, a sort of reeling, at the scale of the largest experiment ever devised and built.

Watching Lucy Kirkwood’s new play unfold at the National Theatre in London induces a not-dissimilar sensation. Mosquitoes, a story of truth and communication, of belief and faith, of family ties and particle physics, is an act of conceptual bravura from a writer approaching the top of her game. It juggles so many strands, personalities and ideas that it hasn’t a hope of keeping them all in the air, but every single one of them makes a fascinating pattern as it falls.

Although it bears traces of the conventional family drama, in its story of two estranged sisters – one a chaotic boozehound at the sharp end of a tragedy, the other a buttoned-up scientist who can’t communicate with her son – its focus is much grander. In a myriad of ways and from a dozen perspectives, it asks vital questions about scientific authority and the endpoint of anti-intellectualism. It weighs the possibility of a world that has grown tired of experts – and the outlook is catastrophic.

Olivia Colman is bottled lightning as woozy, boozy Jenny, whose diet of Silk Cut and Horoscopes is the outward manifestation of a relativist world view that saw her make a life-changing decision about the health of her daughter. Kirkwood sets her play in the autumn of 2008, a time when social media is only just spreading its wings, but Google has sunk its teeth deep into the flesh of scientific authority. Jenny’s anti-vax shtick is just a harmless affectation, until suddenly, terribly, it isn’t.

A near-match for Colman’s brilliance, Olivia Williams is Jenny’s strait-laced, but wounded sister Alice, whose job at CERN allows Kirkwood to shift the scale of her storytelling from the existential, through the political and the personal, way down to the subatomic.

Kirkwood traverses questions of the internet and reader competency, of information and misinformation, and the power of the press to stifle science with attractive but deadly lies. It describes a universe in which every human action dwindles into irrelevance, but where, even so, every decision we make has the power to wound and draw blood at the personal level.

Under pressure

Colman and Williams’ relationship is the Higgs field that gives mass to Kirkwood’s burgeoning themes, and it is never less than truthful and compelling. It does mean, though, that other strands and characters feel the squeeze of so much thought and material crammed into a single play.

Joseph Quinn is strong as Williams’ son Luke, but subplots involving his hacking skills, bullying and sexual fumbling are undercooked, and despite firing off some of the play’s best lines, Amanda Boxer’s elderly grandmother Karen feels almost surplus to requirements.

It’s all framed in a fine production from director Rufus Norris, which despite a couple of small missteps, including a bungled fight and unnecessary ghostly apparition, is a masterful act of plate-spinning. Light when the sky needs lightening, smart and clear when the science needs unravelling, but always ready to deliver a sharp punch to the gut, it drives Kirkwood’s play forward, even through the rockiest patches. Likewise, Katrina Lindsay’s design occasionally teeters on the edge of overblown, but delivers moments of eye-fizzing excitement.

Ultimately though, Mosquitoes is just so intelligent, considered and ambitious that it sweeps aside problems that could shipwreck a lesser author or a more timid play. It’s stuffed beyond bursting, but then, so is any area if you probe past surface platitudes and false assumptions.

In an age of alternative facts and alternative medicine, where fakery and fraud squat in the highest offices, Kirkwood has delivered a play that’s as messy and vital as truth. It consistently rejects easy answers and cosy compromises. It stares into the heat death of the universe and demands that attention be paid to every decision and relationship that exists inside it.

is at the National Theatre, London, until 28 September

Contour-mapping

In 2015, writer Tom Morton-Smith took on the father of the atomic age with his hit play , an epic biography of the obsessive and tormented scientist, which eventually transferred from the Royal Shakespeare Company to London’s West End. He returns to Stratford-upon-Avon for the RSC’s Midsummer Mischief season of new work, bringing a one-act play set at another turning point for particle physics, the first activation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

, presented in a double bill with Matt Hartley and Kirsty Housley’s deconstructed dinner-party drama Myth, is a tentative romance played against a field of quantum theory: a kind of Lost in Translation for the Higgs boson generation.

Rather than thrusting us into the bowels of the machine or the centre of the action, Morton-Smith focuses on a more human collision, between jobbing blogger Clare and Norwegian physicist Fritjof as they maraud around a Swiss hotel in the dead of night. While the story beats are not especially original, the concepts, and their resonance for this tale of loss and healing, are fascinating.

Clare is something of a newbie when it comes to the groundbreaking work of CERN. She’s searching for a scoop, but can’t wrap her head around the science. This gives Fritjof the opportunity to expound on the significance of what Clare insists on referring to as “the God particle“, providing some handy background on elementary particles, the “standard model“, Peter Higgs, and the role of the largest machine ever created.

As Clare and Fritjof deliver some classroom demonstrations of non-Newtonian fluids via a midnight custard fight in the hotel kitchen, Fritjof slowly unwinds his own story of love and loss. Even as we glimpse the role of the Higgs boson in explaining why particles have mass, we begin to appreciate the weight of the physicist’s own memories and regrets.

Slow glass

More fascinating – though less scientifically or dramatically rigorous – is Morton-Smith’s exploration of “slow glass”, a fictitious transparent material with massively complex refractive properties that effectively slow down the speed at which light passes through it. Slow glass made its first appearance in a short science-fiction story by Bob Shaw, “Lights of Other Days” (1966), where it was used as a metaphor for the impossibility of recapturing the past.

Morton-Smith plays his own unique riff on Shaw’s story, and the glass itself is a fascinating object – iPad-black but glowing with deep and dappled green light. Though Fritjof’s story of this priceless experimental material being used to tile his living room is a tad implausible, and never quite achieves the pathos of Shaw’s original tale, it’s a witty and moving update of an irresistible idea.

Thomas Magnussen is pleasingly dry as Fritjof, his coolness gradually tempered by booze and the chatty Clare, played on just the right side of irritating by Lena Kaur. There’s also great work from Rebecca Humphries as hotel concierge Herta, whose implacable application of rules, initially played for laughs, comes to signify the unalterable laws of action and reaction, and the impossibility of evading consequence, no matter how long we stare into the past with our magical mirrors.

runs at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 17 June

Capturing memory

Sleight of hand

It began with the sound of the ocean. Artist was giving a sound workshop at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, UK, for six children with autism and six with severe cerebral palsy.

“I was observing how the children were affected by exposure to natural and artificial sounds,” Ware explains. “One girl in particular with cerebral palsy appeared to respond particularly well to the natural sound of the sea I’d recorded in Teignmouth, Devon, whereas she did not like the artificial sound of a music box.

“Her carers were amazed. I assumed that her condition was such that she wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I was at the beach last week, I love the sound of the sea.’ And this raised the question, is there something inherent in natural sounds that we all respond to? That question formed the beginning of the Wavelength Project.”

Almost 20 years before he launched the project in 2015, Mark suffered a stroke. It impaired the vision in his left eye, left him with lifelong movement and cognitive issues and, crucially, redirected the focus of his work to his own “altered subjective experience”. Artworks which followed included a film inspired by the diaries Mark kept in the months following his stroke; vast banners of his own photographs, digitally manipulated and printed in stereoscopic 3D to be installed in a shopping centre in Brighton, UK and under ; and an interactive sound sculpture to give deaf and partially sighted children experience of audio recording and manipulation. They are works exploring the capabilities of our senses, and also their breaking points; works that seek to identify the extent to which sensory experiences are universal. And they all led to , which could one day extend its tentacles to Mars.

Inspired by his experience with the soothing waves of Teignmouth, Mark collected field samples of 50 natural and 50 unnatural sounds. Then, in collaboration with Hugo Critchley at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science in Brighton, he played these sounds back to volunteers and recorded their brain activity using an MRI scanner.

Participants were less attentive to unnatural sounds, and responded best to natural sounds with which they weren’t even familiar. “This isn’t as simple as finding the familiar presence of tweeting birds or rolling oceans comforting,” says Mark. “It suggests that there could be an intrinsic merit in natural sounds which applies even to those which the subject wouldn’t consciously classify as natural.”

Fascinated by the potential of these auditory experiments, Mark has now turned his attention to the visual. In February 2015 he began working with Nichola Street of Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent, UK. Street is investigating the origins and implications of our in-built aesthetic preferences, in particular how they affect our responses to natural and built environments.

In Reflecting Nature, a touring exhibition of digital prints and part of the Wavelength Project, Street and Ware have created 16 symmetrically patterned images. Street is using eye-tracking software to measure how volunteers react to these (pictured below), and Ware will take the results into account to create art that the pair hope will evoke particular psychological states. It’s an iterative process that sees scientific results blended directly into the artistic process.

It doesn’t stop there. Ware plans to tie these visual and auditory works together into a multimedia piece which can then be refined through experimentation. All this, Mark hopes, is leading towards the creation of “immersive environments that make people feel better, including people with neurological conditions such as stroke”. Therapeutic settings, including hospitals, are one possible application; in time, Mark’s environments may find a use in prisons, schools, even isolated workplaces where access to natural light and sound is limited.

And that’s where Mars comes in. Oliver Angerer of the German Aerospace Centre in Cologne thinks Ware’s work might prove useful in the design of deep-space missions. “Understanding the possible beneficial effects of natural environments and their mechanisms may allow us to adapt space habitats to better suit human needs,” he explains. He hopes that the technologies being developed by the project can create environments that change just enough to stave off boredom and homesickness.

Ware and his collaborators aren’t fusing science and art so much as evolving an entirely new way of working. “If this was purely based in science, it would involve generations of work, investigations, proofs and developments,” he reflects. “As an artist, you can move faster, you can take giant leaps.” Only time will tell whether a future leap will take the Wavelength Project into orbit and beyond.

The Wavelength Project website has details of the Reflecting Nature exhibition, which is

To the stars

Stuck at launch

Visual feast