After seeing The Children at the Lyric Hammersmith, I left the theatre with a feeling that stayed with me for some time. It was not sadness or regret. Nor was it simply gloom because the play is tragic. Perhaps what stayed with me was the thought that even people who still love their lives may one day have to think about both the time they have left and the people who will live after them.
No one can know what the future will bring. The person I am now, in my forties, is quite different from the person my twenty-year-old self imagined I would become. I look at my parents in their sixties, and at other people of that age around me, and can only wonder if I will be anything like them. But one thing becomes clearer as I get older. Life will not suddenly become simpler or easier when I reach my sixties. I will probably still love, regret, and have things I want to hold on to.
After seeing The Children at the Lyric Hammersmith, I left the theatre with a feeling that stayed with me for some time. It was not sadness or regret. Nor was it simply gloom because the play is tragic. Perhaps what stayed with me was the thought that even people who still love their lives may one day have to think about both the time they have left and the people who will live after them.
Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2016. Ten years later, it returns in a new production at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, directed by Rachel O’Riordan. The play is set in a cottage near a nuclear power station where a major accident has taken place. Hazel and Robin, a married couple, are staying in a house so close to the sea that they can hear the waves when they open the door. Since the disaster, the house has been left tilted, and radiation has disrupted everyday life; even water and electricity are limited, but the couple try to hold on to as much of their old routine as they can.
The play begins with an unexpected visit from Rose, a former colleague Hazel and Robin have not seen for many years. As the three talk, their years working together at the power station, their old relationships and long-hidden feelings slowly come to the surface. Once, they worked hard and loved one another when they were young. Now they meet again in their sixties. But they have different ways of thinking about growing older and the time they have left.
Hazel has four children and four grandchildren, and finds a different kind of happiness in her grandchildren than she did raising her own children. Some members of her family lived healthy lives beyond the age of 100 and died peacefully, so she believes she may still have many years ahead of her. Even after the disaster, she looks after her health and tries to live her life as fully as she can.
Rose, by contrast, has never married and has no children. Yet when she calls the younger generation “the children”, the meaning of the title moves beyond family ties. Do we have a responsibility to the people who share this world with us, even if they are not our own children and even if we did not create the problem ourselves? If our experience and skills can lighten their burden, should we be willing to give up part of our own lives? The Children takes the large question of social responsibility and brings it down to a deeply personal choice: what would I do?
The title, The Children, takes on several meanings. For some, “the children” are their own children and grandchildren. For others, they are the young people they may never know, who will inherit the world they have lived in. If the next generation has to live with the results of decisions we make today, what do we owe them? Now that a disaster has struck the nuclear power station where the three once worked, responsibility to the next generation is no longer a distant or abstract idea. Kirkwood explores this question through deeply personal stories of old love and jealousy, family, ageing and death. She carefully places moments when secrets come out, and the past is revealed alongside small events of everyday life, keeping the drama engaging throughout.
The questions at the heart of the play are serious, but there is plenty of humour. The three joke and argue, bring up old love affairs, and talk openly about their ageing bodies. At one point, they dance together as they once did, briefly forgetting everything and returning to their younger days. Even after a disaster has turned their lives upside down, they still eat and drink, love and feel jealous, remember the past, and want to enjoy the life they have left. The more real and ordinary their attachment to life feels, the heavier the choice ahead of them becomes.
The three actors keep the drama tense throughout. Meera Syal’s Hazel tries to hold on to her sense of order and everyday routine, even as the world around her falls apart. Declan Conlon’s Robin, Hazel’s husband and Rose’s former lover, stands between the past the three once shared and their lives today. Kerry Fox’s Rose arrives after many years and disturbs the peace that Hazel and Robin have worked hard to maintain. The actors’ experience, maturity, and ages fit naturally within the roles, making the three characters all the more convincing. As long-hidden feelings from the past mix with present problems, the tension grows. We begin to wonder what choices each of them will make. Robin is particularly human in his uncertainty. When he was younger, Robin often followed his desires. Now he struggles between the life he has built and what he feels he should do next.
Playwright Lucy Kirkwood is known for bringing social and political issues into ordinary people’s lives. Even when dealing with serious subjects, she tells her stories with dark humour and sharp dialogue. Her best-known works include Chimerica, which begins with the famous ‘Tank Man’ photograph from Tiananmen Square and explores US-China relations, the media, truth and personal responsibility. Meanwhile, The Welkin explores women’s bodies, power and collective judgement through a group of women in 18th-Century England asked to decide whether another woman is pregnant.
Rachel O’Riordan, Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, has previously directed plays including Iphigenia in Splott and Killology, which also place big social questions inside personal stories. In The Children, she keeps the focus on the three characters and their relationships. The humour and ordinary moments are given space, making the larger questions of responsibility and sacrifice feel personal rather than abstract.
Both the title and the questions the play raises reminded me of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. In Miller’s play, there is a direct link between Joe Keller’s decision and the deaths of others. When he finally realises that “they were all my sons”, it is a moment of guilt and a late recognition of his responsibility. The three characters in The Children are in a different position. They are not presented as the people who directly caused the accident. But they are experts who spent their working lives at the nuclear power station, and they know that after the disaster there are things they can still do with their knowledge and experience.
If All My Sons asks us to think about responsibility for something we have done, The Children takes the idea of responsibility a step further. Even when we are not directly to blame, if there is something we can do for others, how much of it is our responsibility? The play was written ten years ago, but its questions about the climate crisis and responsibility towards future generations feel even more real today.
For anyone looking for a play that does not offer easy answers, or who enjoys watching three experienced actors slowly reveal the history and tension between their characters, The Children is well worth seeing. As we wonder why Rose has suddenly come to visit the couple and follow the story that connects the three of them, the gentle humour gradually leads us towards questions we may not have expected to face.
I do not know what I will love or want to protect when I am in my sixties. But I imagine that my life will still feel precious to me, and that I will want to believe I have many years ahead. Even then, would I be willing to give up something of my own for those who will live after me? The Children left me with a question for a future version of myself that I cannot yet imagine, and I still do not know how I would answer it.
The Children is playing at Lyric Hammersmith Theatre until October 3.
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