As the world around us has burned or flooded this summer, the environmental themes of Lucy Kirkwood’s pointedly allegorical drama The Children have only grown more relevant in the decade since it debuted – as Lyric Hammersmith artistic director Rachel O’Riordan’s anniversary revival production makes clear.
Ex-nuclear physicists and long-married couple Hazel (Meera Syal) and Robin (Declan Conlon) are living on a remote part of the British coast, trying to eke out a life in the radioactive aftermath of a disaster at a nuclear facility they originally helped set up. When ex-colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) suddenly reappears, the fallout from their past has ramifications for the future.
The actors conjure an effectively brittle and on-edge atmosphere as the nuclear plant looms – literally and symbolically – over them in the form of the enormous reactor tunnel of Gary McCann’s set. It acts as the backdrop and frame for Hazel and Robin’s darkly post-apocalyptic The Good Life-style organic lifestyle. Ever-present and impossible to ignore, the aesthetic neatly evokes the situation’s blunt urgency.
Syal’s Hazel, dressed in muted, earthy tones, is prickly and defensive, wielding a tight smile, yoga and healthy living as her defence against Rose’s incursion. Fox is nervy, frustration fuelling her too-loud laughter and as out of place in the couple’s tautly beige domesticity as her blue jacket. As Robin, Conlon rolls in with a forced jollity that deflates like a punctured balloon. O’Riordan often has them speaking over each other, nicely heightening the sense of conversation as evasion.
Kirkwood’s set-up here is specific but the questions are far-reaching: what legacy are our actions leaving to our children as the next custodians of the planet? Do we have a responsibility to clean up the messes we have made, even if doing so costs us? The mortal threat to Hazel and Robin’s lives posed by the nuclear plant, when Rose finally reveals why she’s there, makes the answers to these questions powerfully real and urgent.
Along the way, the play unearths past romantic entanglements and jealousies that are ultimately less interesting than the central dilemma. More intriguing are the thorny – and satisfyingly incomplete – debates about the value and purpose of a prolonged old age in the modern world, even if the introduction of a strand about letting kids grow up feels a little narratively convenient as the play manoeuvres towards sacrifice.
