THE CHILDREN by Lucy Kirkwood opens with 3 still scenes.  Each of the three characters, singly. Each alone.  Each in their own world.  Throughout the show each, at some stage, will command the intimate, warm space in a cottage surrounded by sea.  This is where Hazel comforts her inner self, where her husband Robin comes home to nest and be taken care of  and where interloper Rose relives the bloom moments of a youth long gone.  Each individual with the potential to put aside their history in search of a future for the children: Miller-like, all the children.

The worst has happened and a tumultuous wave has destroyed a nuclear power station somewhere nebulous on the English coast.  Their house no longer habitable, Hazel and Robin have moved slightly farther and made an old cottage into a serviceably liveable space.  Robin has his cows back at the old home just outside the containment zone and Hazel struggles with the simplicities of homemaking in a new era.  Finding non-radiated greens and preparing the candles for the night’s inevitable blackout.  Into their lives returns Rose.  All three had worked at the plant for a long time and they know its heart and its weaknesses.  Rose has a proposal.

All of this will take place in the wide space of a small kitchen/lounge perched in the blackness of the stage as if threatening to fall into a carved, caved in sea-coast abyss. There is ocean outside the door and its shimmer and roar sometimes makes itself known without actually threatening.  The initial owner here is Pamela Rabe‘s Hazel.  A perpetual motion machine, she is never still, always productive with well-worn routines and practices that bring to her a semblance of calm.

Rabe explores this dynamism with mesmerising deliberateness and instinct, even standing she is braced, leaning, poised for action.   She reaches blindly for what Hazel knows is there as she chatters and fills the space.   Rabe embraces Hazel’s physicality while endowing her with a confusion and displacement that totally belies the exterior shell. Not exactly stoic but with depths well suppressed by history.  Near the end of the play, Hazel has a flash of stillness, of listening, and that moment is simply heartbreaking.

When we first meet Sarah Peirse as Rose, she is off kilter, red blood gushing and unsure of where to be despite half-remembered echoes of cottage layout.  But there is strength in her and it is sharply focused in a wry amusement at the fuss she will set off around her.  The character has a clear determination, a purpose and Pierse handles the comedy so well.  Throwing a line after just enough pause for us to catch up with Rose.  And this is a Rose who is whip-smart.  Once her nose stops bleeding and a cup of tea settles her, Rose is on a mission.  Pierce gives the distinct impression that Rose has been in therapy, that she knows her motivations and that her inner monologue, regrets and losses, never obfuscate the main goal.

Robin on the other hand is played for surfaces.  Such a good performance from William Zappa.  Initially Robin is caught off guard and his reversion to type is skilfully modulated, as is his recanting of the boyish show off.  For here is a man with secrets of his own, a man of sadnesses and of nihilism only held off by force of will.  His comfort and discomfort impel him around the space as he negotiates the tricky female situation.  Rose and Hazel might be playing nice but there is an undertow as violent as the outside waves and of which he is deeply aware.  There is one small but telling beat where Hazel and Robin are drawn together after a phone call.  It is without the bravado that has impelled any previous overt closeness and it is breathtaking in its complexity.  One exquisite moment of joining.

Director Sarah Goodes has navigated her cast through the complex physical and emotional topography with a close eye on the threat from without.  The curses of consumerism and capitalism ally with littering and nuclear waste outside the intimacy of this story but we never lose sight of the relationships in the microcosm.   The humour, of which there is a great deal, is so well balanced with the narrative and while I might have found the last few sequences a little too long and the travel to the ending a bit slow, my interest in the characters was undiminished.

Also vital to the cohesive success of this production is the setting. Whitewashed and sturdy, there are cracks and inconsistencies. Doors that have weight and require the patience of familiarity to open.  Shelves and storage and homey things brought from before. (Designer: Elizabeth Gadsby) And times we see light through the boards. The lighting (Paul Jackson) is stunning in its setting of place and time of day.  The final state was not to my liking, too aquarium blue and an unnecessary overstatement of theme, but the rest I loved.

The superb tone of the silvery grey hinted with steel and blue hitting the stage left wall betraying the day’s passing yet totally in concert with the warmth of the amber wash and the subtle above waist highlights on occasion.  The audio (Composer and Designer: Steve Francis) also fit seamlessly into the little cottage.  That hit of lighting with the up of the power grid would not have had the same impact without the noisy fridge starting up too.  Just one of many great effects to listen out for.

And the laughter.  Millennials laughing in different places to us oldies who obviously do enjoy a laugh at ourselves and our aging.  The thrill of seeing old people physically re-living their youth and the brilliantly conceived and executed finale which slow morphs into a thing of beauty beyond old hurts.

THE CHILDREN is all that.  Conception and execution to entertain  yet with a precision in the colliding of reality and self perception that makes one admire and wonder, “Would I?  For the children?  For myself? ”

Sydney Theatre Company and Melbourne Theatre Company’s Production of THE CHILDREN continues at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until 19th May.