The Children

The perceptiveness of the pen of Lucy Kirkwood, an English playwright who gained acclaim through writing for the television series Skins and Succession, can also be traced in her play The Children, which the Guardian named the third-best production of the 21st century in 2019. In a cottage somewhere on the east coast of England, three protagonists – nuclear physicists and colleagues from thirty years ago, a retired married couple and their friend, who seems to have "lost herself" in the wide world and is still active in her professional field – are engaging in a seemingly light-hearted and witty conversation. But the reminiscences of their shared youth and their discussion of different ways of coping with ageing and the premonition of the ending gradually turn – somewhere around the play’s midpoint – into a very poignant inquiry of the future, spurred by the recent meltdown at a nearby nuclear power plant they helped to set up together. To go or not to go there to help, to forgo their comfortable lives or to resign themselves to fate?… The casual rummaging through the past, combined with several unpredictable but intimately "fatal" revelations, suddenly becomes a relentless inquiry into the future, not just their future but the common future of humankind. And as a completely different question – can we make decisions that our consciousness offers to us by threatening us with an imminent end?

Photos: Peter Uhan / SNG Drama Ljubljana