Review - The Children - Canadian Stage, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✭

by Lucy Kirkwood, directed by Eda Holmes

Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

September 26-October 21, 2018;

Centaur Theatre, Centaur Theatre 2, Montreal

November 6-25, 2018

Hazel: “If you can’t change, don’t live”

Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children from 2016 is a slow-burn of a play. It begins with humorous, seemingly trivial discussions but ends in a momentous decision that leaves us reeling. Canadian Stage produced Kirkwood’s best-known play Chimerica (2013) in 2016, but not only is The Children more concentrated, the questions it poses are more profound. With an all-star cast under the insightful direction of Eda Holmes, it is hard to imagine a better production of this subtle, disturbing play.

When we enter the Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs we see Eo Sharp’s remarkably detailed set showing the square floor and two walls of a humble cottage seemingly furnished with mismatched finds from Goodwill. The realism of the room, however, is undermined, literally, by our glimpse at the supports for the floor which appear to be made of various debris including several petrol containers. Surrounding the protruding corner of the room is a reflective sea-green surface suggestive either of the sea, the sound of which is heard continuously in John Gzowski’s moody soundtrack, or of bilge water in a holding tank. We learn later that all three characters are nuclear engineers who used to work at the same nuclear power plant built near the sea, so both interpretations of the water-like surroundings are possible.

Kirkwood does not tells us where the three characters used to work, but the fact that the nuclear plant is on the coast and that it is near a medieval town that fell into the sea because of coastal erosion suggests she is thinking of the Sizewell power station in Leiston, Suffolk, which is less than ten miles from the village of

Dunwich, most of which fell into the sea in the 13th and 14th centuries due to huge storm surges that crumbled the coastline. The story about Dunwich, like that about the nameless village in the play, is that some claim to hear the church bells ringing underwater.

The location of the humble cottage in this play, set in the near future, is of enormous metaphorical importance. As we note from occasional remarks in the conversation the co-tenant of the cottage Hazel (Laurie Paton) and her former colleague Rose (Fiona Reid), now visiting after more than 30 years, the power station where they worked experienced a disaster very similar to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. In both cases a tsunami generated by an earthquake shut down the reactors at the station but flooded the emergency generators needed to cool them. This led to nuclear meltdowns, explosions and the release of radioactive material. In both cases residents were told to move outside an exclusion zone set up a certain distance from the power plants to protect them from radiation poisoning.

Hazel and her husband Robin (Geordie Johnson) had to leave their former home behind because it was inside the exclusion zone and moved to this cottage. Metaphorically, Hazel and Robin live in an area that is still being eaten away by the sea. The hubris of human beings in building a power plant there was that they ignored the historical example of the now-sunken medieval village. Worse, the plant was so designed that the emergency generators would necessarily be flooded in the event of a storm surge, thus leading to even greater disaster. The first question the play asks is what responsibility the generation of the three characters, now all in their 60s, has to the younger generation or, as the play calls them, their children.

As Rose and Hazel discuss deceptively trivial matters first over tea and then over dinner, it becomes apparent that the two have markedly different responses. Hazel has always striven to live a full, healthy life. She eats healthy food, exercises regularly and her role model is her grandmother who lived to the age of 103. She has had four children and is now a grandmother herself. Hazel’s motto is, “If you can’t change, don’t live”. Rose is just the opposite. She has never married, has no children and wants no children or even pets. She drinks, smokes eats whatever she wants and never exercises.

Initially, Rose’s deliberately unhealthy lifestyle seems comically selfish compared with Hazel’s strict regimen. Yet, part of the point of Kirkwood’s play is to make us question these first impressions. Robin points out that because of advances in modern science, human beings live far longer than they were ever intended to. In

earlier times all three of them would be dead by their 60s. From an evolutionary point of view, what point is there for parents to live beyond the time they have raised their children and sent them off into the world to live their own lives? Thus, the second and even more fundamental question the play asks is why have we fetishized long life as something to be desired? Unless we help others, isn’t a long life not only pointless but selfish?

Robin, who happens to have slept with both Rose and Hazel, not only has his human children by Hazel but the cows of his former farm that he also calls his “children”. Even though the farm is now inside the exclusion zone, Robin says he goes there every day from dawn to dusk to take care of his children who somehow have survived the radiation. He tends them and milks them, though, of course, he has to throw away the milk.

The play through such simple means asks not just about about the responsibility of one generation to the children of the next, but about the very point of living in general. Rose says mockingly that Robin is going through an “existential crisis”, but that is exactly what all three experience once Rose makes the mysterious purpose of her visit clear.

Those who complain that the modern stage seems to have no interest in older people will find The Children a welcome counterexample. All three actors are in

their 60s just as are their characters, though it must be said that they are all so robust and lively that 60 is luckily no longer the age of decrepitude that it once was.

All three actors absolutely shine in their roles. Laurie Paton, once a mainstay at the Shaw Festival, gives one of her best performances ever as Hazel. She has mastered the art of hinting with just the slightest change of tone that a darker attitude may lurk beneath Hazel’s superficially light banter. When she utter’s her motto, “If you can’t change, don’t live” to Rose, she repeats it in such a way that her hidden animosity bubbles up and the words “don’t live” seem to be her direct command to Rose. Students of acting should study with what apparent ease Paton can build up through simple words and gestures multiple layers of often contradictory meaning.

Fiona Reid is, of course, also a master of these techniques. With Rose, she uses them to develop a character who has created a façade of jokiness and triviality to disguise the deadly seriousness of her reason for visiting her former colleagues. Reid lends Rose nervous mannerisms that tell us that darker thoughts than she will admit are preying on Rose’s mind.

Similarly, Geordie Johnson’s Robin assumes a hail-fellow-well-met attitude even though, as we discover, Robin’s underlying train of thought is anything but jolly. It’s easy to understand Robin’s attractiveness to both Hazel and Rose, but, as Holmes’s nuanced direction tells us, we come to see his philosophy of life now coincides with that of only one of the two women.

The Children is an extraordinary play that traverses the spectrum from comedy to tragedy in the space of only 90 minutes. When the action begins we have no idea that we will be confronted at the end with the questions of what humankind’s duties are and what its purpose on earth should be. The lives of Hazel, Rose and Robin, like the sea cliffs where they live, are all crumbling with age and wear into oblivion. Dylan Thomas would exhort us to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. Kirkwood wonders whether we can counter our futility with more than rage.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com or https://centaurtheatre.com.

2018-09-28

The Children