Somewhere along the British seacoast, a snug cottage designed for holidays has become a full-time refuge for a retired couple. With their careers as nuclear scientists over, she does yoga, and he farms. But their haven is only 10 miles from the power plant where they once worked. They moved because disaster struck: An earthquake triggered a tsunami that flooded their former home and crippled the plant, which released radioactive material.
In Northern Stage’s production of The Children, the stage design alludes to apocalypse, but a matter-of-fact English stiffness in the performances masks catastrophe. Playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s characters spend most of the play discussing superficial topics while hinting at old psychological wounds. Only at the end does the play accelerate emotionally as large moral questions arise.
Only at the end does the play accelerate emotionally.
ALEX BROWN
From the outset, viewers wrestle with contrasts. The stage reveals a comfy cottage planted on top of rubble, the floorboards a ragged edge above what looks like civilization’s last trash. Inside, a charming plate rack hangs below ominously heavy ceiling beams. The characters speak with neat British reserve in fastidiously realistic dialogue, but the subject is rarely the crisis around them or their true feelings about each other. The dagger of disaster is at no one’s neck, and only the sound design, bristling with menace, conveys threat. Where are we?
Kirkwood and director Sarah Elizabeth Wansley seem to want us to feel ill at ease. The play opens with a character speaking to someone offstage while calmly nursing a bloody nose, with no hint to what caused it. It’s a bold theater choice to perplex us, almost as disorienting as having a nose bleed. The problem is, we’re confused before the characters are clear enough to matter. We aren’t destabilized by the story but by a struggle to connect with the play itself.
To Hazel and Robin, scientists in their sixties, this postapocalyptic world is old hat. Electricity is rationed, and a Geiger counter sits by the coatrack to assess the radioactivity of people, places and things. Yet retirement still means staying in touch with children and grandchildren by phone. These characters have an iron grip on normalcy, which can only mean it will ultimately slip.
The bloody nose belongs to Rose, a nuclear physicist and former plant colleague whom Hazel hasn’t seen in 38 years. Has Rose returned from America to restart a past affair with Robin or to prod at the tension she and Hazel have always had? Or could she have a more disturbing purpose?
She does, and the play takes far too much time to disclose it. For a full third of the show, Kirkwood sets Hazel and Rose to stilted chatting that lets us know they mistrust each other but not why, or why it could matter.
When Robin arrives, the makings of a very old love triangle stir the story, but the exchanges remain muddy when the characters’ history is left so obscure. Even the age dynamics aren’t clear, as Rose dresses and moves younger than her age, though all three are contemporaries. Overall, emotion can’t spark when we can’t see what’s at stake, and whatever’s been lost to some apocalyptic event is overshadowed by Hazel’s sturdy competence as she busily winds a battery radio for the next power blackout.
The play’s fuse burns very slowly, but eventually Kirkwood forces three characters who think of themselves first to face a situation that tests self-interest against sacrifice.
Individually, each actor builds finely wrought moments onstage. As Robin, Gordon Clapp portrays a man battling anxiety by overdosing on confidence. Robin has kept a child’s love of risk and drives his tractor closer and closer to the cliff’s edge, knowing age brings him close to another edge. Martha Burns, as Hazel, brings limber energy to a woman admirable for always doing the right thing — and a bit suffocating for feeling such superiority in doing so. Still, Hazel seems the only one suited for crisis. Rose arrives keeping her every motivation hidden, and Daphne Zuniga must make her tick using nothing but understatement. When circumstances crack her open, Zuniga makes the play’s abstract questions fully human.
The cast is frontline talent, with impressive stage, TV and movie credits. The actors’ skill is evident in this production, but as of last Thursday’s preview they hadn’t formed a tight ensemble. Scenes built on subtle tension felt unfocused, with too much surface and too little beneath. Wansley concentrates on movement to show the characters’ discomfort, but the action rarely has purpose and pulls our attention out into a wide-angle view when the situation calls for a close-up. The play’s keenest moments arise when the characters are still enough to speak and listen.
The Children tempts a reviewer to examine the play’s objectives instead of its execution. Kirkwood’s script confronts three characters with an ecological disaster, and they’re the right people in the right place to personify the story. Yet the script substitutes reticence for depth. The Northern Stage production brings together three strong acting talents but can’t connect them emotionally through low-key British dialogue and muffled backstory.
The play should produce disquiet, just as the sound, lighting and set design steadily remind us. But I found myself watching a story that seemed to find no way to say what was important to any of the characters, or to all of us living in some proximity to climate crisis. Hazel, Robin and Rose manufacture a particular distance from each other and from the radioactive air around them. The play’s remarkable ending finally shatters that distance when the vision turns outward at last.
This article appears in Money & Retirement Issue • 2026.
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