The Children review: Intimate drama presented as environmental disaster in Lucy Kirkwood’s magnificent play

Two retired nuclear scientists are visited by an old colleague in this excellent drama. Photo: Ros Kavanagh 

Gate Theatre, Dublin

Mar 7-23

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

A uranium atom, everyone knows, splits a subatomic particle into three neutrons, sparking a chain reaction. Lucy Kirkwood’s magnificent play, receiving an outstanding production by the Gate Theatre, seems to take nuclear fission as its plot structure.

Set on a remote coast, it finds Rose (Ger Ryan), a retired nuclear scientist, visiting old colleague Hazel (Marie Mullen) for the first time in nearly four decades, only to be struck in the face. Startled and apologetic, Hazel makes a fuss while Rose insists on catching up: “How are the children”?

As Rose politely listens to her friend talk of grandchildren and healthy-living, Ryan’s sublime performance gives her a subtle and affecting sadness. Alone and struggling with illness, she only ever found meaningful connection in Hazel’s husband Robin (Seán McGinley).

It could be easy to presume that the nucleus for sending these three characters onstage is simply their tangled desires. In fact they all played a part in the creation of a local nuclear power station, now damaged after a natural disaster, and leaking with radiation. 

Marie Mullen, a contralto for earthy descriptive dialogue from Synge to Murphy, is about the only actor who can give Kirkwood’s imagery such disturbing power. Whether it be a family home destroyed by a tsunami not long ago, or a village from the Middle Ages that crumbled into the sea, both unsettle in this essential era. 

Similarly Sarah Bacon’s set, a wood-panelled cottage with limited electricity, is its own dreary vision of living in a post-disaster world. 

Kirkwood seems to be interested in giving environmental disaster the hard-fought sentiment, and possibly pathos, of intimate drama. When Rose flirts with McGinley’s juvenile Robin behind his wife’s back, she is only marginally more upset that her old lover has four children than she is about their combined carbon footprint.

Those are fascinating meditations for any play but they are bound here by quite original plotting. It turns out Rose isn’t here as much to topple the love triangle than she is to make an extraordinary suggestion that all three of them to return to the power plant.

That opens up a compelling moral debate about generational guilt, whether to absolve oneself of responsibility or put a new legacy in place. Fittingly, in the same blue dusk glow of Sinéad McKenna’s lighting, personal culpability in an extramarital affair also comes to the surface.

Director Oonagh Murphy’s excellent coda mightn’t shy away from showing a threatening crisis, but at same time it finds touching gestures from its characters, underscored by Kevin Gleeson’s gorgeous music. These retired scientists are creating new energy.