The Children, by Lucy Kirkwood
In fading light
on a shingle desert
at the serrated edge
of the dying world
there is a cottage without any power.
Outside, a nuclear meltdown has split the earth and flooded the ground with sea and with radiation.
Like “boiled milk”, she says. The wave was like “boiled milk”, boiling and boiling on the horizon, until she turned and ran.
Or maybe it was the other way round. Maybe it was the flooded ground that overwhelmed the power station and then the meltdown followed. Maybe it was the way the earth cracked. Maybe it was the safety valves, their design, where they were. Inaccessible.
Either way, the sea, the earth, the radiation — now it is one. It’s “the disaster”. Later, they will sweep the ground of its “dirty glitter”, try to ride things out.
Two women, 60 or more, nuclear physicists; they haven’t seen one another for a long time. They are friendly and frosty at once; their familiarity is easily remembered, like the other things. They are polite, they are tense. They behave to one another like boiling milk, a long way away.
(In this domestic scene, the news that they are nuclear physicists makes me smile. Happening in theatres right now is a slow unfolding, long overdue: a recognition of the importance of gender equality — on stage, in texts, and throughout the many operations of an organisation. I hope that when the Royal Court is recognised for its work to rebalance this inequality, they are also acknowledged for their representation of older women — ‘invisible’ women — the breadth of their experience and the weight they quietly bear.)
In this fading light
on a shingle desert
at the serrated edge
of a world once dying
two nuclear physicists catalogue the changes in their lives.
Hazel has made many. She and Robin have moved house, altered their diet. She does yoga while he tends to the cows that they both know are dead. At the end of the phone, their eldest daughter is scared.
Rose speaks as clearly as she sees. She sees cause and effect. She sees sacrifice and responsibility. She sees the collective future of all the children she never had, never wanted, and she sees that she has failed them. She sees the housing crisis, and the pensions crisis, and the refugee crisis, and she understands that her individual choices do not excuse her from collective burden.
Rose reminds me of the male suicide statistics I read recently, and my unsympathetic reaction to them. Perhaps, I had thought, perhaps if more men took their fair share of caring responsibilities, of emotional labour, perhaps more women would be free to kill themselves.
(I should have said earlier that this play is very funny. It’s very funny.)
The Children has satisfied something in me tonight. It has satisfied the bleakest, darkest part of me. The part of me whose favourite book is about Hiroshima, whose favourite artist is Anselm Kiefer, whose favourite album is The Eraser. It speaks to the part of me which wanders ruins and reads Sartre and hopes for another monetary collapse.
Letting go of what we know is an act of hope.
The Children is a magnificent play.
