Sarah Peirse and Pamela Rabe in The Children. Photo credit: Jeff Busby.
In an austere cottage by the sea something is amiss. There is a tension that palpably disrupts the calm one might expect from living in isolation by the ocean. Unusually, it is a stranger calling that brings this home into focus and restores the normal pace of human interaction. Of course this is a setting devoid of normalcy, a human-made and localised dystopia. A natural disaster has caused Fukushima-esque fallout in the English countryside, and three old friends reunite in an attempt to make peace with their personal and professional failings, from which a different kind of poison leaks.
Hazel (Pamela Rabe) is organised. Rose (Sarah Peirse) is not and Robin (William Zappa) is the unlikely and gregarious apex of their gently simmering love triangle. But Robin is not the reason that Rose has returned, not principally anyway. She’s back to enlist her former colleagues to help clean up the mess and in the process, take the chance that the radiation seeping from the damaged reactor may go on seeping directly into them.
The Children is not a probing discussion of intergenerational responsibility, the cost of ambition and the hubris that it inevitably – well, not completely. Neither is it a character drama where three aging friends must reckon with their own personal failings as their lives wind down – well, not completely, either. And this is the binding dilemma of The Children; it keeps a foot in both courts without ever choosing a side.
Rabe and Peirse are utterly spellbinding; it is the sheer brilliance and subtlety of their performances that allow this unresolved dilemma to be maintained. The dialogue flows smoothly, the intrigue builds but is repeatedly broken by moves from the lives of these three to the larger issue at hand. A joke, a jibe and the focus changes. Despite its effects on the dramatic tension, there is something easily recognisable in the approaching and backing away from difficult conversations. We all do it and seeing it so expertly recreated on stage is a sometimes challenging experience. The difficulty in going deeper is clearly a difficulty of the characters themselves as much as is it a complex path to prosecute and yet, the desire to see more said about the dangers of our modes of energy consumption and production does not abate.
The fact that easy answers do not exist to the personal or professional conundrums faced by the character preclude the issues from being both fully and honestly explored. The incompleteness challenges the viewer to push deeper themselves, think and construct what you might like to fill the gaps. In asking this, The Children offers some of the best on-stage performances you’re likely to see as inspiration.
4 out of 5 stars
The Children by Lucy Kirkwood
A Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company co-production
Director: Sarah Goodes
Set and Costume Designer: Elizabeth Gadsby
Lighting Designer: Paul Jackson
Composer and Sound Designer: Steve Francis
Cast: Pamela Rabe, Sarah Peirse, William Zappa
Southbank Theatre, The Sumner
3 February – 10 March 2018
