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The Children review – a toxic past refuses to remain buried

Theatre by the Lake, Keswick
Lucy Kirkwood’s domestic-seeming drama has the steely underpinning of a Greek tragedy

A visitor arrives at a cottage by the sea – unexpected but not unknown. Rose has spent the past decades in the United States. She and Hazel have not met since Hazel’s eldest child was a toddler (she is now a difficult, offstage, grown-up, needily phoning home because her washing machine has broken down). Rachel Laurence (Rose) and Maggie O’Brien (Hazel) perfectly catch the spry, spiky awkwardness of the women’s catch-up conversation, its friendly surface rippled by an undertow of dislike and/or suspicion.

Lucy Kirkwood’s 2016 play unfurls information gradually (sometimes too teasingly for my taste). The cottage stands just outside a no-go zone, contaminated following a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. Both women are nuclear physicists. Hazel is retired, as is her husband, Robin (Patrick Driver). All three were involved in the construction of the defective plant, their failure fully to consider its location contributed to the scale of the disaster.

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