Review: THE CHILDREN, Starring Meera Syal

The climate crisis abuses us of the notion that we’re invincible, and ultimately forces us to reckon with exactly how much time we have left on Earth. On a much smaller scale, the same can be said of getting older.

In The Children, Lucy Kirkwood takes this analogy and runs with it. Inspired by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear explosion, her 2016 play follows Hazel (a virtuosic comic turn from Meera Syal) and Rose (Australian actor Kerry Fox), two nuclear scientists and old friends in their 60s with a healthy dose of unresolved tension. In a remote domestic idyll with an aesthetic halfway between a log cabin and a spaceship (Gary McCann’s set design is a masterclass in worldbuilding), the pair hash out their differences amid a nuclear apocalypse that has forced their community into isolation.

It’s revealed that Hazel and Rose have some level of culpability in the nuclear disaster that caused this state of affairs. Helping to fix the issue they caused would result in their deaths from radiation poisoning, so the play comes to pose the question of whether old age brings a sense of greater duty to others, or simply a licence to put one’s own wellbeing first. Hazel and Rose occupy opposing poles of this dilemma, and it’s one of those deftly written onstage conflicts where both people are in the right.

The environmental metaphor might have resonated in 2016, but with the proliferation of plays about the climate crisis in more recent years, it doesn’t feel enough anymore merely to point to the older generation’s responsibility for the crisis, which has been reiterated time and again. The idea of older people’s debt to the young feels quaint and overstated now, and sometimes at odds with the show’s chatty domestic setting.

This production chooses to focus on that domestic setting, languishing in the script’s slower moments, in banter about early parenthood and taking up yoga; an important revelation related to the nuclear waste, by contrast, possesses little fanfare when clumsily dropped into the narrative by Rose. The kitchen sink-style of Rachel O’Riordan’s direction, while elegant and highly watchable, does not help the sense of climate change as an afterthought.

There is still a rich seam of tragicomic humour here, and the two lead actresses tap into it to great effect: Syal as a deadpan woman on the verge, passive-aggressively winding up her electricity generator, Fox as a social misfit who’s not quite aware her jokes aren’t landing. The character of Hazel’s husband, another scientist who’s also had a romantic entanglement with Rose, is less convincing, but Declan Conlon imbues the character with a sense of hardwon personal philosophies and repressed sexual tension.

The Children is a showcase for Kirkwood’s skills as a writer both of observational comedy and of profoundly existential work. The play’s shortcomings are still laid bare in this new production, but it’s an exciting chance to see a modern gem, that still has pertinent things to say a decade on from its premiere.

The Children plays at Lyric Hammersmith until 3 October

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