Review: THE CHILDREN, Royal Court, 24 November 2016

Three sixtysomething retired scientists talk to one another in a remote seaside cottage for two hours. It doesn't sound like theatrical gold, but in Lucy Kirkwood's deft hands, an unassuming premise becomes transformed by a quiet dramatic alchemy. The Children isn't a play that shouts, but it's one whose whispers carry far and linger even longer - a warm, funny and devastating portrait of the end of the world as we know it.

Kirkwood's 2013 Chimerica was a sprawling, geopolitical epic that could scarcely squash itself into 18 characters and a three-hour span, a work whose initial run at the Almeida led to a West End transfer and four best play awards. Three years later the author is back with an altogether more intimate play, but one that's no less political, in its way. It's inevitable that all theatre currently coming out of the UK will become Brexit theatre - even if it wasn't intended as such. The Children may have been appropriated after the fact, but that won't stop it becoming one of the most thoughtful and poignant responses to the crisis.

When you've already tackled global politics it takes some doing to up the theatrical ante, but a nuclear disaster just about does the trick. We're on the East coast of England, months after a major nuclear disaster. Retired physicists Hazel and Robin have retreated just outside the exclusion zone in search of a simpler life. But when former power station colleague (and lover) Rose arrives to interrupt their yoga and yoghurt-eating, she complicates things with questions that can neither be satisfactorily answered nor ignored.

Kirkwood's power station hums with metaphorical life. The legacy of one generation to another, it is both gift and curse, and the question of their responsibility to the young at this moment of crisis is picked over meticulously in dialogue whose currency, both comic and tragic is the unsayable. But where Pinter would offer up silences, Kirkwood gives us endless chatter. There are some deliciously stumbling, syncopated exchanges between Deborah Findlay's guileless Hazel and Francesca Annis's inscrutable Rose, tripping constantly over conventions of politeness in their attempts to get to the truths just behind.

If the arrival of Ron Cook's raddled lothario Robin noticeably dulls the tension and slows the pace it's more the fault of director James MacDonald than Cook himself. An ecstatic dance routine to James Brown aside, the second hour drags rather than powering on as it should into the unexpectedly oblique ending, trapped in Miriam Buether's exquisitely claustrophobic designs. The absent voices - the children themselves, whose lives are here at stake - become overwhelming, a lacuna never quite filled by Kirkwood's circular conversations, demanding a companion play all their own.

The Children is a deft and disarming discussion about the banality of disaster and its fallout - nuclear and otherwise. Kirkwood handles her radioactive material with care, and the mutter and stutter of conversation are never drowned out by the threatening click of the Geiger counter. It should be required viewing for all baby boomers staring into the current political abyss and looking for either consolation or advice.

The Children is at the Royal Court until 14 January 2017

Picture Credit: Johan Persson

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