Writer: Lucy Kirkwood
Director: Rachel O’Riordan.
Lucy Kirkwood’s gripping post-catastrophe dramedy of manners, The Children, gets a welcome and timely major revival at the Lyric Hammersmith, a decade after its first production at the Royal Court. The theme of the piece – what responsibility do current generations have for those who come after us? – feels, in the face of seemingly unchecked AI and ever more apparent climate change, more pertinent than ever. One wishes Kirkwood would get to the point a little sooner than she does: we are midway through before semi-polite conversational skirmishing gives way to meaty moral dilemma. But tremendous performances and zippy comic direction from Rachel O’Riordan make for a satisfyingly thought-provoking evening.
Hazel (Meera Syal) and Robin (Declan Conlon) are the kind of retired middle-class scientists who “pick up other people’s rubbish”. They are living out their eco-friendly superannuation somewhere on the English East Coast in a rickety borrowed cottage with an Aga, a SMEG fridge, and dodgy plumbing. She struggles determinedly against the oncoming shadow of old age by making salad, practising yoga, and meticulously excising grey hairs from her face. After all, she tells us, “If you’re not going to grow, don’t live.” He listens to Radio 4 on a wind-up set, brews lethal parsnip wine, looks after cows on a local organic farm, and fields stressful calls from the couple’s angry, depressed, needy daughter Lauren. So far, so tiresome, self-congratulatory, bickering baby-boomer.
But things are not what they seem. The cottage sits 10 miles from a nuclear power plant that, not so long ago, suffered a tsunami-induced meltdown. The couple’s tap water may be contaminated, their power is intermittent, and they must use Geiger counters to measure radiation exposure. It was a “one in 10 million years fault sequence”, Hazel tells us, and she ought to know, given the couple, both nuclear scientists, spent most of their working lives at the plant. The couple’s addiction to the minutiae of middle-class domesticity is, in part, a response to the horror unfolding in the near distance, for which they themselves may bear some responsibility.
A complication arises when former friend and colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) pitches up unexpectedly at the couple’s front door after 38 years’ absence. Hazel accidentally thumps her on the nose. “We’d heard you’d died, so it was a bit of a shock”, she says by way of an apology that she may or may not mean, given that Robin and Rose had an on-off thing together back in the day.
What follows, at least initially, is drawing-room drama as the trio bicker over mortality, the importance of kids, who neglected to stay in touch with whom, and semi-submerged sexual jealousies. Rachel O’Riordan fields the collision of bourgeois etiquette, petty resentments, and existential destruction more or less perfectly. Anticipate copious consumption of parsnip wine and a neatly choreographed dance to a James Brown tune.
Midway through, we get to the question on Hazel and Robin’s minds. What on earth is Rose doing there? That question soon morphs into something bigger. What responsibility do we have to our world, beyond doing the best we can for ourselves and our own children? Rose has a big ask for the couple, one which may change their cosy lives forever. Kirkwood has the unseen Rose defecating in the couple’s toilet, so blocking it up and threatening to flood the cottage, a metaphor for the impact her visit is about to have.
Gary McCann’s top-notch set, brilliantly lit in radioactive hues by Anna Watson, places the cottage inside the curved concrete circle of what might be a nuclear power station containment dome. There are echoes here, deliberate or otherwise, of one of those dystopian TV shows where survivors from a holocaust sequester themselves until things are safe to come out. It is a stark visual reminder that this trio is trapped in a tragedy to which they themselves contributed, and escape will require action.
Syal is a fine comic actor, and gets Hazel’s defensive, self-righteous determination to enjoy her retirement, come what may, spot on. Fox’s louche nomadic Rose, the diametrical opposite to the matriarch Hazel and still with an eye for Robin, is tremendous, too. Declan Conlon brings cheery Irish roguishness to Robin, though one wonders whether a retired nuclear scientist would really be milking cows and touching up female farm hands with such obvious abandon.
The Children is one of those plays you leave thinking about. The question we face as we walk away is the same the characters face. Will we make a choice to do anything about it?
Runs until 3 October 2026
