"The Children". Burton Taylor Studio. Review by Anuj Mishra

On paper, the plot of Lucy Kirkwood’s 2016 play The Children sounds quite extreme. A couple of sixty-something physicists living on the edges of a nuclear fallout zone receive a surprise visit from an old friend they haven’t seen in decades. New company, Fennec Fox Productions and director, Joshua Robey succeed in playing out this dystopia with superb realism and wit, prompting uncomfortable realisations while maintaining an atmosphere of entertainment.

The play begins in the middle of things, with the breezy and nonchalant Rose (Alice Macey-Dare) nursing a nosebleed caused by a thump from the overbearing and antsy Hazel (Izzy Lever). It’s evident that they know, or once knew each other, but it’s hard to figure out how well they know one another, or how long it’s been since they last met. Later, we are introduced to Hazel’s brutish yet sympathetic husband Robin (Nathaniel Wintraub), who also knows Rose.

For most of the play, we are forced to feel around in the dark for any semblance of plot. All the key information – why Rose has turned up? what caused this dystopia? what relationships did each of the three have with one another? – is drip-fed, some of it well into the latter-half of the play. Nonetheless, the play doesn’t feel laboured or slow at any point, in some part due to its excellent writing and one-act structure, but also because each character was played so humanly.

Izzy Lever played the yoga-obsessed, health-crazed Hazel with evident gusto, getting across the character’s holier-than-thou poise with strings of hilariously delivered bank-handed compliments towards Rose. Alice Macey-Dare as Rose began with a guarded facade which slowly evaporated as she revealed her true motive for visiting. As Robin, Nathaniel Wintraub succeeded in playing a slightly lewd, but undeniably loving man struggling to keep afloat. All three succeed in evading the awkwardness that often accompanies students trying to play characters who are forty-odd years older than them.

The play offers nuanced takes on two salient issues: choosing to die and looming catastrophe. Though here it’s a nuclear catastrophe, the production gestures us towards climate catastrophe through conveying the collective responsibility these first-world pensioners possess as their attempt at energy stability falls apart, polluting the ocean along with it. The resultant dystopia, with its uncultivable soils, poisonous air, and limited hours of electricity, is – as Rose points out – only truly unimaginable to a first-worlder.

The sun slowly sets over the course of the play and, just as we find ourselves in almost complete darkness, the generator clicks on, setting off a ceiling light and a kettle with it (lighting by Matty Ara). It is in the well-executed details like this that this production has real strength. Characters pour real drinks and drink them, chop up vegetables and eat them, all in real time – there’s a clock on the wall to remind you of it (set by Naomi Armstrong).

The Burton Taylor can seem hopelessly constraining, forcing productions to pare themselves back too far. The Children, by contrast, fills out the space perfectly. By effect, the play’s fabulated, dystopian plot becomes, paradoxically, a perfectly executed piece of realist theatre.

The Children will continue its run at the Burton Taylor, 7.30pm until Saturday, 8^th February. Runtime of 1hr 40mins.