Review: THE CHILDREN at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Tuesday 6th February 2024.

The Children, given in this well-crafted production directed by Corey McMahon for State Theatre starts as a rather traditional comedy, but playwright Lucy Kirkwood has chosen this framework to lay important questions before the audience.

One of those questions is about the responsibility of science and scientists to the world and to the coming generations. Finegan Kruckemeyer’s Hibernation is another recent approach to the same issue of science, humanity, and responsibility. The Children has been described in some quarters as Sci-fi. It’s not. It’s an approachable domestic vision that brings the big questions to a kitchen table. The story unfolds like a tea towel. The dialogue is deft and there are many laughs. It’s not Noel Coward or Alan Ayckbourn, but the audience loved it.

The lights go up on the main room, cosy, shabby, and instantly recognizable. It even has a kitchen sink. The costumes are equally comfy and a little shabby. Victoria Lamb has done a fine job creating this space, lit carefully by Nic Mollison. Belinda Gehlert’s score of orchestral seascapes, and an irritating dance routine, managed by Andrew Howard, is exceptionally fine.

After an absence of many years, Rose, a former colleague, arrives at the home of Hazel and Robin, a retired couple living a simple life in a rundown cottage near the sea. We learn several things. Electricity is severely rationed, drinking water is bottled, and food is in short supply. Then we discover that Hazel is a nuclear physicist, as is Robin, and they live unnervingly close to a nuclear power station that melted down spectacularly a few years previously. The three of them met there and worked together. Automatically you think of Chernobyl and Fukushima, the concept of the exclusion zone, and the description of the tsunami, but I think Kirkwood remembers the UK’s Windscale disaster of 1957 in which many people died.

Kirkwood quite consciously employs devices, tropes maybe, from bourgeois comedy. The phone rings, Hazel dashes offstage, and Rose and Robin fly into each other’s arms, confessing their desires. You knew that was going to happen. You knew that Hazel knew about the affair between Rose and Robin. Is that how Rose knew exactly in which kitchen cupboard the glasses were kept?

As the play progresses, the true purpose of Rose’s arrival becomes clear. The devastated nuclear facility is being cleaned up by a younger generation of nuclear technologists. She is recruiting retired colleagues to take over the job, leaving their families behind so that the new people can return to their own children.

The cast deliver well-made performances of this well-made play. Tina Bursill is a happily settled Hazel, with the support of Terence Crawford’s Robin, and Genevieve Mooy is excellent as the conflicted Rose, visiting and revisiting her past, to forge some sort of reparation.

Kirkwood’s script is articulated well by these three actors, and serves as a lesson to all would-be playwrights on what to tell and when and how to tell it.

There is one very important action and image that I missed. I was sitting in seat B 30, the second row of the balcony. This gave me a great view of the action, but I was unable to see something really important that was told to me afterwards by friends in the foyer. Early in the play, Rose goes to the toilet and when she returns Hazel asks her if she did a number one or a number two. You see, a number one is fine in the downstairs toilet, but a number two will clog the system and eventually lead to an overflow, a very messy thing to clean up. She lies, it transpires, and says she only did a number one. During the raucous dance routine, there is a raucous dance routine, which brings Hazel down from upstairs, and water starts to ooze under the door at the back of the set. It flows to the front of the stage. In the final moments, as the two women perform a yoga routine, the man puts on the yellow dishwashing gloves, finds a mop, and starts cleaning up. It is just so clear. Prior actions, some of which were lied about, have created a situation where their happy lives are subject now to a flood of pollution. It is the job of one of them, at least, to clean it all up. The two women are busy. It’s the man’s job.

My theatre partner claims that the dance routine is designed to wake up those members of the audience lulled to sleep by the cosy predictability of the action. He’s waiting to see it done by the Rep in the Arts Theatre and is already suggesting a cast from among our best-loved local performers.

Photography, Matt Byrne.