The Children review

Caroline Harker is all prickly passive aggression as Hazel, making sure that her every seemingly civil utterance comes laced with low-key hostility. On the surface, she may seem collected and proactive, keeping fit with yoga, clinging to domestic routines in the face of disaster. But Harker’s eloquent performance clearly conveys the raw fear underpinning her ordered life. Sally Dexter’s Rose, outwardly confident and conciliatory, has an edge of impatience beneath her polite patter – an eagerness to broach her ulterior motive for visiting her old friends. Her whole demeanour changes when she is alone with Clive Mantle’s insouciant, gravelly-voiced Robin. While Rose becomes stiff and awkward, refusing to be touched, Robin eagerly presses into her personal space. Robin relentlessly compliments and teases the two women in his life, but stops short of playing them off against each other, disguising his behaviour as cheeky, flirtatious charm.

The ambitious set by Amy Jane Cook depicts a cross-section of a cottage, revealing bare earth and pipes below the floorboards, and exposed roof beams above. The whole structure is canted at a slight angle, so that items roll off tables and floodwater pools, inches deep, in one corner. Subtle touches hint at the calamity that these people have survived – drinking water comes from a giant bottle on the countertop, a Geiger counter stands by the front door – underlining the fragility of the illusion of normality that Hazel has tried so hard to create. Gradually, each precise detail builds up, revealing the play as a fascinating examination of selfishness, self-sacrifice and our moral obligation to future generations.