The Children shakes up the Centaur
If it weren’t for the descriptions of the sea boiling like milk and of the “filthy glitter” of radioactive fallout in the air, Lucy Kirkwood’s 2016 play The Children (playing at the Centaur to Nov. 25) might put you in mind of the kind of British telly drama best watched wearing a comfy cardigan and slippers while sipping a hot cocoa. At the heart of it is a 60-something couple whiling away their retirement in a cottage somewhere on the English coast. Enter a face from the past and the three old friends (Fiona Reid, Laurie Paton and Geordie Johnson exhibiting an entirely more appealing kind of glitter) set about reminiscing over a bottle of homemade parsnip wine. But Kirkwood, who wrote the Olivier Award-winning global political thriller Chimerica, masterfully juxtaposes this sense of cosy familiarity with terrifying apocalyptic imagery, rather in the way H.G. Wells brought a Martian invasion to a drab town in Surrey. The context here is not so much science fiction as the hard science fact of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters transposed to Kirkwood’s neck of the woods. Husband and wife Robin (Johnson) and Hazel (Paton) are retired nuclear physicists who survived the devastating meltdown at the plant at which they previously worked. Having abandoned their home, they now live in a cottage just outside the exclusion zone. Their old colleague Rose (Reid) has turned up apparently for a casual visit but actually for something far more earth-shattering. At first, Kirkwood subtly hints at the pall of death and devastation that lies beyond, and perhaps within, Hazel and Robin’s rustic retreat (designer Eo Sharp blending sturdy naturalism with the ominously surreal). The play’s first image is of Rose standing there with a nosebleed — not perhaps for the reason you might expect, but still a dread foreshadowing. An apple placed on a table rolls away, revealing that the cottage has been skewed by the explosion. Robin gives a child’s tricycle he has retrieved a once-over with a Geiger counter. By the end of the 90 minutes of real-time drama, audiences are left with a moral conundrum worthy of Greek tragedy, not without hope for the future but with a tough reckoning of the debt owed by baby boomers to those eponymous succeeding generations. But even without the post-apocalyptic context, The Children would be a riveting, thoroughly entertaining character study of three once-vital party people slipping, with varying degrees of equanimity, into oblivion. The dialogue sparkles with brilliantly honed one-liners and there’s an irresistible dance scene that lifts the spirits even as the toxic sludge of guilt and regret (made queasily literal at one point) sloshes about the characters’ feet. It helps that the performances, under Eda Holmes’s direction, are as perfectly pitched as it gets. Shaw veterans Reid and Paton hold the stage for the first half-hour or so as Rose and Hazel amusingly catch up on old times while barely concealing the tensions, and perhaps underlying hostility, between them. (One question Kirkwood teases us with: why does Rose seem oddly familiar with the cottage she claims not to have visited?) When Johnson’s Robin eventually appears, we get a real sense of the swaggering charmer he once was as he joshes with the women, mischievously aware that he’s sometimes crossing the line. It’s mesmerizing team work, honed by several weeks at Toronto’s Canadian Stage where it opened last month. After her somewhat disappointing production of The 39 Steps a year ago, this one is persuasive evidence that the Centaur has a first-class director at its helm in Holmes.