Review: THE CHILDREN at The Players' Ring

What starts as a casual catch-up among old colleagues spirals into something much heavier, darker, and deeply haunting in Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, now playing at the Players’ Ring in Portsmouth. In the famously intimate confines of the Ring—where the actors are often close enough to breathe on you, the tension doesn’t just fill the room; it sits right in your lap.

Kirkwood’s script drops us into a modest seaside cottage in the wake of a nuclear disaster that has permanently scarred the coast. Hazel (Donna Phofolos) and Robin (Robert D. Murphy), both retired nuclear engineers, are scraping by with flickering power, limited supplies, and an outside world that feels increasingly hostile. They’ve settled into a fragile routine built on a mix of survival and denial, living in the shadow of a power station accident they actually had a hand in creating. When their former colleague Rose (Kimberly Holliday) appears after decades of silence, the emotional barometer in the room shifts instantly.

Director Matthew Parent and this veteran cast understand that in a play like this, restraint is the skeleton key. This is a brilliant, slow-burn unraveling that runs 100 minutes without an intermission, and it never relies on grandstanding or monologues to make its point. Instead, the play sneaks up on you. Piece by piece, conversation by conversation, it reveals the impossible moral questions sitting underneath the everyday chatter. Parent knows that silence is often as important as dialogue, and there are moments where a simple look across the room says more than any page of exposition ever could.

Holliday gives Rose a magnetic, calm intensity that keeps the audience rapt. She enters with the energy of someone carrying a trunk full of unfinished business, yet she reveals her character’s hand slowly and methodically. Holliday lets Rose’s determination emerge so naturally that her eventual purpose feels even more devastating when it finally lands.

Phofolos offers the production’s most layered performance as Hazel. At the start, she appears as the practical, slightly weary one, emotionally cautious and guarded. But as the evening progresses, Hazel becomes the true emotional heartbeat of the story. Phofolos handles that evolution beautifully; her reactions feel internal rather than "performed," making the character remarkably believable. By the final moments, Hazel’s quiet acceptance carries an enormous, heartbreaking weight.

Robert D. Murphy brings a nervous, charming warmth to Robin that initially lightens the mood. His humor feels genuine, providing much-needed levity, but Murphy expertly peels back the layers to show the fear vibrating underneath the constant chatter. He captures a flawed man who desperately wants life to remain manageable even as the truth becomes impossible to ignore. Murphy’s work in the final scenes is especially affecting because he never pushes too hard; he delivers a masterfully nuanced character with amazing subtlety.

A particularly sharp detail in the script is Hazel’s obsession with yoga, which Phofolos plays not as a quirk, but as a symbolic search for balance and control in a world that no longer offers any certainty.

The chemistry among the three actors is as firm as concrete. You fully believe these people share decades of messy history—affection, resentment, and deep-seated regret. Nothing about their interactions feels forced or staged. At times, it feels less like watching a performance and more like overhearing a private, deeply personal confrontation. That proximity, a hallmark of the Players' Ring experience, makes the audience feel they are living inside the story rather than merely observing it.

On the technical side, Ben Bagley’s set design creates a weathered coastal cottage that feels lived-in and real without being cluttered. It serves as a cozy, fragile sanctuary against the harmful world just outside the door. Lauren Stetson’s lighting design nicely shifts the mood throughout the night, moving from warmth to unease almost without the audience noticing. The outside world is never seen, but through sound and atmosphere, its presence is constant and looming.

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