REVIEW: Won’t Someone Think of The Children? Apparently Not
The Children is a new eco-thriller from British wunderkind Lucy Kirkwood about the coming Apocalypse – and the responsibility this generation must assume for the carnage we have left.
It’s given a slow burning but harrowing mounting by Wild Side Productions as part of the Roxy Performance Series. The ripped-from-today’s-headlines play will run in the Roxy On Gateway through March 22.
The ominous music that begins the evening portends the serious and thought provoking events to follow.
Hazel (Coralie Cairns, above) and Robin (David McNally) have been long married and are now living a quiet life in a dreary cottage on the edge of what they call, “The Exclusion Zone.” They shared long careers as scientists at a local nuclear facility, and are not particularly happy about their forced retirement.
As the play begins Rose (Ruth Alexander) shows up unexpectedly at the door and (literally) runs into Hazel, giving herself a bloody nose. There’s a hilarious 25-minute conversation between the two women, who at one time shared Hazel’s husband. At first it seems to be a lively exchange on marriage, children and aging but soon leaves that familiar territory behind.
As Hazel, Cairns generates a steely venom – a surprising reaction from a woman who has spent her last years in genteel resignation. There is a suggestion that she has a secret or two of her own. Rose at first appears congenial but in Alexander’s performance there is a growing hint of something beyond mundane conversation. McNally is the affable and solid centre of a world that grows increasingly tangled. The able actor projects the possibility that his plainspoken manner is more veneer than solidly rooted. The play is dialogue heavy but the three veteran performers keep the air crackling with a discomforting sense of menace. All three are complex and contradictory and their performances are absorbing and sympathetic. In the vast pool of talent we are blessed with in this town – it’s hard to imagine any actors who would be any better in the roles.
Rose, who seems cool and contained at first, has been living abroad for 38 years and has a secret reason for her visit – a secret that will only be dramatically revealed much later in the play. To complicate matters, Robin shows every sign of wanting to fan the long-dead embers of his relationship with Rose. Hazel is aware of this development, and in one of the play’s many twists it becomes obvious that the playwright is after much bigger game than rejuvenating a long-dead affair.
There is an early clue. When Rose goes over to get a glass of water Hazel innocently inquires, “Did you get it from the tap?” suggesting that tap water has been rendered undrinkable. The electricity only runs occasionally. Robin daily crosses the border into “The Exclusion Zone” to tend a farm. Slowly we get the details (in an eerie echo of the Fukushima nuclear disaster) of how a huge wave from the ocean struck the facility and brought about a meltdown.
Director Jim Guedo conspires with the playwright to withhold the big payoff, while making sure we’re staying rapt by teasing our expectations – threading enigmatic clues to the coming reveal throughout the play.
The Children is not a happy experience – based on the possibility of a world gone mad and the catastrophic result of human meddling in the natural order. It is, however, an involving dramatic and intellectual experience. With its slow release of difficult moral questions, it deliberately moves toward the tragic thought that it may be already too late for our children, and perhaps it will require an existential move on our part to right the wrong.
“We have lived long and fruitful lives. Perhaps it is time to let the young go while they still have life,” says the play.
This is all pretty heavy stuff but Guedo keeps the production from becoming portentous or static – mostly by constantly shifting his tone and keeping his performers slightly off-centre. He skillfully moves his production to a highly emotional, and perhaps inevitable, ending. The last few minutes are memorable, riveting and quite overpowering in their impact.
