The Children by Lucy Kirkwood is a life-or-death drama about three ageing boffins invited to fix a broken atomic power station and save Britain from nuclear disaster. There’s one snag: radiation poisoning will end their lives. Should the old crocks accept the kamikaze mission?
The setting for this macabre tale is a cosy farmhouse occupied by 64-year-old Hazel (Meera Syal) and her chattering Irish husband Robin (Declan Conlon). Their colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) shows up after many decades working abroad and she urges them to join the suicidal engineers working on the radioactive site.
The stakes are low because the characters are too old for their love lives to matter much
The script contains a lot of chit-chat that relates only tenuously to the main story. The characters are old friends from university and they face an unresolved romantic dilemma. Rose dated Robin who married Hazel but kept Rose as a side-option for years afterwards. Hazel knows about their affair and she assumes that Rose has arrived to steal Robin from her. This creates some amusing scenes of conflict and jealousy but the stakes are low because the characters are too old for their love lives to matter much.
And the children mentioned in the title never appear. Hazel has three grown-up kids, and four grandchildren, but she doesn’t ask them about killing herself to save humanity. This omission greatly weakens the story.
The play works best in its smaller and more homely moments. Hazel considers rustling up a salad for lunch. ‘Personally,’ says Rose, ‘I find salad deeply depressing.’ She recalls a long affair with a Nasa rocket scientist whom she teased by making him perform simple tasks in the hope of prompting him to say: ‘It’s not rocket science.’
Her backstory makes her accent tricky. She’s an Englishwoman from the home counties whose long career in the US has tinctured her speech with strong American colourings, and yet Fox, a New Zealander, delivers the role with a ripe Kiwi accent.
Syal has fun playing Hazel as a mischievous old granny who natters, jokes, laughs and occasionally dances around her lovely kitchen. From time to time, she screams with anger at her feckless husband but her fury doesn’t last long.
Conlon’s Robin is a generic Oirish charmer whose dramatic function is like cornflour in gravy. He thickens the sauce without affecting the taste. None of the actors has to try very hard because the script makes few demands on their ability.
It’s a nice show with a beautiful double-layered set by Gary McCann. The farmhouse kitchen is all rich, dark chocolatey browns. Overhead looms the icy grey vault of the nuclear turbine. This sumptuous design is almost too good for the play.
Fresh from Edinburgh comes a new satirical comedy with a poster that looks like a porn show. Julia Grogan, the writer and performer, poses on all fours in a stripper’s pink outfit but the image is a fantasy in the character’s head. Grogan plays Miss June who dreams of becoming a movie star and abandoning her humdrum life teaching ballet to under-fours in a village hall.
The play starts with Miss June auditioning for a minor role in a BBC reality show. She gets the part. She’s on her way to Hollywood but her contract is abruptly cancelled and she has to return to ‘Twinkly Stars’ and beg to be reinstated. She throws herself into her work and she laces her instructions with dire health warnings. She tells the tiny ballerinas to avoid fatty foods in case they cause ‘anxiety and thunder thighs’. And she shares a story about an old school friend ‘who drank a litre of aftershave and was buried in an unmarked grave’. Having set aside six weeks’ rehearsal for the end-of-term show, she orders the girls not to waste their time ‘chatting to boys’ when they might be practising their box splits.
Grogan has charisma, versatility and charm galore
Her obsessive focus on teaching is clearly a substitute for the voids in her life. No boyfriend, no children, no career prospects. Having grown up in the village, she harbours malicious thoughts about her neighbours. The girl at the pharmacy ‘got a BTEC in small pet care’ and now spends her time ‘selling verruca cream’ and yet she exudes an air of professional superiority. Miss June would rather masturbate ‘with a razor blade’ than work in a shop.
By the time the show opens, Miss June is dressed as a medieval knight with a 3ft sword, and she’s spouting slogans from self-help videos. ‘We’re going to find our limits and set them on fire.’ Naturally, the show fails to live up to her pharaonic expectations.
This is a great play that brilliantly and truthfully recreates the grinding futility of rural life for those who dream of escape. Grogan has charisma, versatility and charm galore. Where next for this tragically hilarious monologue? It could transfer to TV.
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