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.
When he returns home, Robin appears as surprised as Hazel by Rose’s arrival, although it becomes clear that he and Rose (single and not a parent) have been secretly seeing one another over the years. Stefan Escreet’s direction cannily develops the suspense so that the audience’s curiosity mirrors the couple’s: why is Rose here?
The “children” of the title turn out to be metaphysical as well as literal (brainchildren as well as real offspring). Rose has come to ask Hazel and Robin to face up to the consequences of long-past actions by assuming responsibility for them and acting to put them right. Kirkwood’s humour-laced, domestic-seeming drama has the steely underpinning of a Greek tragedy, with personal choices tightly bound to sociopolitical realities.
• In rep at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, until 1 November
