When The Children was premiered at the Royal Court in 2016, it hit you between the eyes with its deadly calm scrutiny of self-annihilation. Now 10 years on, director Rachel O’Riordan has replaced that chilliness with a warmer palette.
The Royal Court’s production was comparatively slow to go for the big “reveal” (spoiler alert) about a couple being visited at their seaside cottage by an old friend who are living in the aftermath of a man-made “disaster”, just down the road from a nuclear power station. Their former home, a farm with cows, is now inside an exclusion zone, where radioactivity levels are too high for human habitation. Even so, workers are trying to shore up the ruins of the power station and prevent another crisis.
At the Lyric, Gary McCann’s set design positions Hazel and Robin’s cottage bang-slap inside a giant industrial concrete tunnel. It’s visually striking but signals that their existence is an unusually precarious one from the off. Those who have seen the play before may not be surprised by this design choice, but first-timers will have had a key contributor to the tone of creeping dread neutralised. This is no ordinary seaside location (probably the Suffolk coast, home to the lost village of Dunwich and Sizewell B), and the characters aren’t typical middle-aged retirees. This trio, we gradually learn, are some of the engineers who built the power station and whose design didn't sufficiently factor in exceptional conditions in the neighbouring sea. That freak accident has occurred.
Despite the fact that Rose (Kerry Fox, pictured right) has visited unannounced, startling Hazel (Meera Syal), who has reacted by punching her in the face and bloodying her nose, the atmosphere at the cottage seems pretty humdrum, though with extra privations. Only bottled water can be drunk, and the electricity supply is erratic, so the couple have learned to live on salads and to power their radio with a wind-up battery. One of the utensils in their kitchen drawers, casually rummaged for by Rose, is a Geiger counter. They do have a working phone, though, and the oldest of their three children, Lauren, checks in with them regularly.
Rose is like a visitor from another world — indeed, her old colleagues had actually heard she was dead, hence Hazel’s shock at seeing her again — but it soon becomes clear she was once very much part of the couple’s lives, too much so when it came to Robin. She is also persistently solicitous about their children, for a reason that slowly emerges. It’s a toothsome role that Fox duly bites down on, a woman with a difficult life recently who is now on a private mission. She’s part naughty girl, part hero.
The three of them josh and dance, Robin (Declan Conlon, pictured below left, with Meera Syal) proving quite the party-boy, though Hazel seems to simmer with hidden resentments. Syal projects her as an older, put-upon housewife in a domestic comedy, snippy and tart at times, angry at having to mop up the leaking toilet and keep the household going. But she does yoga and watches her diet, determined not to give into death and disaster. I missed, though, a strong enough sense of the inner life beneath the surface anger that the text requires Hazel to have. Conlon is more readable, a raffish, acerbically witty man with a clowning side that makes him ride a child’s tricycle around the kitchen. He has just enough love left for his wife and family to keep going but is, in an important way, broken. All three are processing their guilt in their own ways, Hazel by bustling it aside, Robin drowning it in homemade wine and Rose plotting how to push back against it.
Kirkwood’s writing is still a marvel, strong on little grace notes that bring the dialogue alive, such as when Rose describes a disliked functionary as “a man with a clicky pen”, and their eccentric colleague Douglas is portrayed as somebody who’s “happy with a sleeping bag and a scotch egg”. The repartee is smart but never slick and speaks of people who once lived inside each other’s lives.
O’Riordan keeps the dialogue and pacing snappy, almost overly so as the action proceeds, so that the denouement seems to arrive abruptly, and with less impact than I remember. The play, though, is still a major achievement: a modern morality tale with roots back in an older era of drama where characters made life-changing decisions and squarely faced the consequences of their actions. It’s an Ibsen play where the past's toxic legacy isn't allowed to win.
