The Children at Lyric Hammersmith: Meera Syal excellent in post-apocalyptic drama

In Lucy Kirkwood’s compact, post-apocalyptic three-hander, a catastrophic disaster at a nuclear power station on the UK coast stands as a metaphor for the blighted legacy older generations are today bequeathing the young. Rachel O’Riordan’s tenth anniversary production shows the play – originally staged at the Royal Court - to be both slightly dated and depressingly current, succinct in some respects and vague in others.

Sixty-something Hazel (a bustling, on-edge Meera Syal) and Robin (a booming, overbearing Declan Conlon) are holed up in a barely on-grid seaside cottage, outside the exclusion zone around the leaking plant where they once worked. Electricity is scarce, irradiated veg must be washed and conversations with their distant children are limited. But cabs still operate and Robin can still drive to the petrol station for a sneaky Pepperami.

Their lives have a kind of equilibrium: he making weapons-grade parsnip wine in the cellar and nostalgically visiting the farm where they kept cows; she doing yoga and plucking chin hairs to combat the march of age. Until a visit by old colleague Rose (a brassy Kerry Fox, leaning into her native Antipodean accent) rakes up old jealousies and sparks ominous thoughts of the future.

The opening reveal is dramatic: the rough wood of the hippyish cottage sits inside the vast metal hoops of a reactor core in Gary McCann’s set, and Rose stands bleeding copiously from the nose, having apparently been lamped by a startled Hazel. Their conversation after 36 years apart is tense and awkward. Rose is watchful, suspicious, biting back questions and accusations.

Meera Syal and Kerry Fox

Helen Maybanks

The two are opposites. Hazel was a brilliant scientist as well as an exemplary mother of four, with a holistic approach to life. Rose, also a physicist, has no children, eats crap and smokes despite a serious brush with cancer. She also has scant regard for the sanctity of others’ relationships. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal she and Robin were also entangled. (He also gets a pervy monologue about a bosomy local girl: most male writers would balk at writing such a character.)

But if Rose is the epitome of a feckless older generation, she is also the one who hatches a plan – in the words of Hazel’s holiday motto – “to leave the place cleaner than we found it”. This will quite literally require a form of self-sacrifice. Hazel and Robin think they have conditioned themselves to accept less in life. But they, too, have had a vampiric effect on the next generation. Will they atone?

Kirkwood slowly builds up the couple’s world – the periodic sweep of a Geiger-counter, the malfunctioning macerating toilet - and she also deftly sketches in the trio’s past lives, including an oddball colleague who owned only a hammock and a suitcase full of Cup-a-Soup. She is very good on the slow surrender or ageing and our reluctance as humans to give anything up.

“The children” are frequently invoked but since the only one mentioned by name is Hazel and Robin’s troubled eldest, Lauren, I briefly wondered if the others were imaginary. The disaster at the plant was prompted by an earthquake and tidal wave that flooded the couple’s house (or it may have been vice versa).

Meanwhile local legend has it that you can still hear the underwater church bells of an entire local village that was long ago claimed by the sea. Nuclear scientist Hazel wonders why an island nation hasn’t harnessed the waves instead of betting on nuclear. Ten years on, the question stands.

Syal’s character is the heart of the play and she’s great in it, constantly in nervy motion, worrying at the moral and existential questions the other two mostly skim over. Conlon is forceful and sonorous as Robin and Fox makes the best of the least well-fleshed part. O’Riordan’s economical, fluid production makes the play feel alive and timely, if perhaps not quite a modern classic.