Last Updated on September 11, 2026
A tender study of nuclear fallout
4.0 out of 5.0 starsLucy Kirkwood’s The Children is about energy. The emotional core of the play is a charged love triangle between ex-engineers; its literal core is a broken nuclear reactor that explodes the drama into life. The Children explores the repercussions of an environmental catastrophe as they play out in the minds and bodies of three middle-aged characters. It’s a one-act story that studies the ways technology both literally and figuratively bonds with people. Following its 2016 Royal Court debut and 2018 Broadway transfer, The Children returns to London at the Lyric Hammersmith, directed by the theatre’s Artistic Director Rachel O’Riordan.
We find our protagonists in a coastal Suffolk cottage. A rough sea churns outside the window; there’s no land in sight and everything in the house is slightly lopsided. This is life on the edge.
Hazel (Meera Syal – Serious Monkey) and Robin (Declan Conlon – The Playboy of the Western World) are retired nuclear engineers. She’s become an anxious, ambitious homemaker; he is a whimsical, deceptive rogue who shares out homemade parsnip wine. Their four adult children have left home. They could be settled empty-nesters with an idyllic country home.
But details about a past nuclear disaster emerge. Hazel’s memories are wrapped in trauma, and Declan prefers to wander the radioactive countryside than confront his troubled mind. What’s clear from the start is that the pair have relocated outside an exclusion zone following a tsunami-induced disaster at their nuclear plant. Raditation is a constant threat; there’s a gas mask hanging by the door.
Onto the scene steps Rose (Kerry Fox – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), an old colleague of Hazel and Robin’s. She comes with a difficult request, and her arrival is the launch point for an exploration of simmering trauma, latent affection and the long shadows of nuclear catastrophe.
Environmental drama is difficult to pull off. The threat of eco-Armageddon is such an all-encompassing theme that narrative structures often collapse under its weight. But The Children is an example of how strong characters can break through this tension to achieve a play that thinks seriously about the human costs of huge environmental events.
Stage veteran Meera Syal is the emotional bedrock of The Children. Her blending of an upright mother and a traumatised scientist gives the play its uneasy atmosphere. Her psychological instability echoes the disintegrating coastline on which her house is balanced. In this way, Syal integrates the ecological and the personal. She is The Children’s guiding light.
Declan Conlon is magnetic as Robin. His aloofness plays well against Syal’s anxiety and affords space for some cracking one-liners. Kerry Fox’s portrayal of Rose is no less considered. Her knack for drawing out unspoken truths in her friends’ relationship, paired with her strong moral compass, continually raise the stakes.
But The Children is most compelling for how successfully it finds resonant images to structure its drama. Rose claims to have heard the tolling bells of Dunwich’s medieval churches, a Suffolk town lost to coastal erosion hundreds of years ago. The underwater village takes on a kind of half-life in the play: it’s unreachable to the characters and yet embedded in their sensory landscape. They reach for this image of the vanished town to express themselves. Boxed in by his relationships and decaying body, Robin admits he feels “eroded” – as if he too, like Dunwich, has collapsed into a watery half-life. The Children creates a metaphoric language to explore personal trauma and huge ecological change as one and the same.
The Children approaches people as if they are themselves sites of nuclear disasters. Kirkwood’s script pieces characters together from their fragments and holds them up to the coastal light. The writing is funny, nonjudgmental and moving in how it brings radioactive threat into a Suffolk living room. It’s a brave production with braver performances.
The Children runs at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre from Wednesday 2 September to Saturday 3 October.
Lyric Hammersmith Theatre
Lyric Square
King St
London W6 0QL
Looking for something different? Check our review of The Story at the National Theatre.
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