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Review: In ‘The Children,’ the Waters Rise and a Reckoning Comes Due

Deborah Findlay and Ron Cook as married physicists visited by a former colleague in Lucy Kirkwood’s play “The Children.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
NYT Critic’s Pick

First the earthquake. Then the tsunami. Then the nuclear reactor shuts down when the tidal wave reaches its seaside dome. But not to worry. That’s why they have emergency generators.

In the basement.

Putting emergency generators where floodwaters can quickly render them useless sounds like a design mistake only a polemical (or satirical) playwright would invent. But part of the horror of “The Children,” which opened on Tuesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is that the author, Lucy Kirkwood, did not dream up that part of the plot. Pretty much the same chain of events caused the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

“It was a one in 10 million years fault sequence,” says Rose, a physicist who helped build the play’s fictional plant on the crumbling east coast of England.

Well, maybe two in 10 million?

And yet one of the astonishments of “The Children,” which comes to the Manhattan Theater Club intact from a run at the Royal Court Theater in London last winter, is that even though it is completely successful as an eco-thriller, bristling with chills and suspense and foreboding sound effects, denuclearization is not its subject. Just a few months after the core meltdown, Rose and the two other characters, also physicists involved in the plant’s creation, remain blasé about that. They assume that such facilities, albeit better designed, will have to be part of the world’s energy mix for a long time to come.

No, the “fault sequence” Ms. Kirkwood wants to explore is a great deal larger and, given human nature, more intractable.

But that only dawns on us slowly. First we meet Rose, standing in the kitchen of a ramshackle seaside cottage and ignoring a prodigious nosebleed. She has arrived uninvited to visit Hazel and her husband, Robin, the other two physicists, now retired. They have lived here, a few miles outside the disaster’s “exclusion zone,” since their longtime home and farm nearby was inundated by the tsunami.

Why Rose has come now, after 38 years in which the three have (apparently) been out of touch, is part of the mystery. What’s clear from the microaggressions served with the tea is that she and Hazel, supposedly old friends, are each seething about something. Hazel (Deborah Findlay) expresses her chirpy fury in a kind of militant healthfulness: She boasts about eating sensibly and keeping fit through yoga while repeating with bizarre emphasis a self-help nostrum that sounds more like a threat: “If you’re not going to grow, don’t live.”

But Rose (Francesca Annis) has discarded what pretensions toward graceful aging her six and a half decades have not already stolen. She even smokes, as if in sympathy with the still-unsecured reactor. Mischievous and sly, she speaks in dramatic curlicues, partly because she is biding her time before springing a trap.

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From left, Francesca Annis, Mr. Cook and Ms. Findlay, reconnecting in the aftermath of a nuclear meltdown, in “The Children.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

At first, Ms. Kirkwood — who won the 2014 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for “Chimerica,” a drama about Chinese-American relations — lets you think the trap may be romantic and that the play is a gloss on Pinter’s “Old Times.” Rose, we notice, is more familiar with the cottage than a total stranger to it would be, and the embers of an old triangle, with hearty, glad-handing Robin (Ron Cook) at the apex, are stirred.

To say whether those embers reignite would be to inflict a minor spoiler on you, but really “The Children” is unspoilable. Its true concerns, which at first are only Rose’s, become so lofty and yet at the same time so essential that the play is as disturbing to replay in your imagination as it is to see in the first place.

Which is not to minimize James Macdonald’s production, as good as any in New York just now. Mr. Macdonald is best known here for his stagings of Caryl Churchill, another playwright strongly recalled in “The Children.” Its uncanny interweaving of banality and atrocity may even be a tribute to Ms. Churchill’s “Escaped Alone,” a post-apocalyptic drama that Ben Brantley and I both included on our lists of the year’s top 10 theatrical events.

In that play Ms. Findlay portrayed a suburban woman deathly afraid of cats, and there’s something defensively middlebrow, despite the advanced degree, about her Hazel, too. Ms. Annis, a Juliet opposite Ian McKellen for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977, suggests in Rose the kind of woman Juliet might have become had she lived (and dumped Romeo). Mr. Cook, as a man who spends most of his time deflecting the intensities around him, has the trickiest role and carries it off beautifully.

But to see the three of them maneuver around one another on Miriam Buether’s tilted shoe box of a set is to understand what it means to be well directed. The naturalness of Mr. Macdonald’s stage movement in such a confined space (to say nothing of Peter Mumford’s baleful lighting and projection design) is central to the containment of energy that makes the play thrilling. It also helps cover for the inevitable little playwriting dodges by which Ms. Kirkwood gets each of the characters out of the room at some point so the other two can have a tête-à-tête.

I didn’t mind those occasional fingerprints; understanding how the thing is done is part of what makes a thriller, or a romance, enjoyable. In any case, the mechanics detract nothing from the accumulating dread of the story: Details quietly provided early on never fail to explode with importance later. A child’s tricycle becomes ominous when you put a Geiger counter near it. Even that nosebleed means something more than you thought it did.

But for all its clever construction, I doubt “The Children” would feel so important without Rose’s agenda and the challenge that comes with it. I will say only that it has to do with selfishness in both its ordinary and also its existential varieties. When Rose tells Robin that “we can’t have everything we want just because we want it,” she means, yes, the love of one’s youth, but that’s just the start. A good death is not guaranteed. Even electricity, as the local disaster has proved, is not a right.

And if, as Hazel smugly insists, you must “leave a place cleaner than you found it,” what does that mean about the earth we bequeath to our children, blotched as it is with our awful mistakes and overrun with centenarian yoginis?

Those children, with their childish parents, may have reason to think Ms. Kirkwood’s title is double-edged. Who’s selfish now?

Follow Jesse Green on Twitter: @JesseKGreen.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Exploring the Half-Life of Their Lives. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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