THE CHILDREN

Optional Supplemental/Background Information

The following information gives some contextual information about the play including details about the playwright and the history of the story and the original production. It is intended for you to use as much or as little as interests you and is in no way required for you to be familiar with it in regards to our discussions.

SCOTT’S TAKE

The Guardian: The 50 Best Theatre Shows of the 21st Century -

#3: THE CHILDREN by Lucy Kirkwood - Lucy Kirkwood’s probing, thoughtful play showed three nuclear physicists reunited in the wake of a disaster at a local power station. This opened up huge questions about the poisoned legacy we are handing on to future generations and about whether having children heightens or diminishes one’s sense of responsibility. It was an impressive, slow-burning work that confirmed Kirkwood’s status in the front rank of British dramatists.

The Guardian: Knockouts, Nobles and Nukes: The 25 Best British Plays Since JERUSALEM.

THE CHILDREN: Lucy Kirkwood is the only writer to get two entries in this selection. Deservedly so, because this three-character play raised a host of big issues. Set on a Norfolk farm following a nuclear catastrophe, it brought together two long-separated female scientists responsible for building the contaminating plant. In the intervening years, one had borne four children, the other none. This allowed Kirkwood to explore topics including whether parenthood increases a sense of social responsibility and how people in the future will react to the poisoned legacy of the present. A humane triumph.

One of the things that I find so wonderous about THE CHILDREN is how dissimilar it is to CHIMERICA. For one (or three), it very strictly follows the three classical Aristotelian unities:

1. Unity of Action: a tragedy should have one principal action.

2. Unity of Time: the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours.

3. Unity of Place: a tragedy should exist in a single physical location.

Not to mention the drama is unbroken (there are no scene breaks or breaks in the action) so it also takes place in real time. All of this is very traditional and, in the majority of cases today, very out of fashion. So strutcurally it is both familiar and an anomoaly.

Also, for a play with such a seemingly smaller scope than CHIMERIA, it actually addresses issues quite as pressing and important as that play and is just as political, if not ovettly so.

It’s tight, but not rushed; tense, but not overbearing; focused, but not constrictive. The world of the play is just foreign enough to feel just out of reach, yet familiar enough to feel alrmingly relevant.

It’s a tour de force for the three actors (older actors, at that) that provides ample laughs, discomfort, pain, celebration, and dread for each.

I love the tension in the many incendents that are noticed but not spoken of, the choices of when to confront and when to allow things to pass, and the rarely acknowledged anxiety of the post-accident world Lucy has created.

I really like the play. I’m just sorry it was coming into its own right at the start of the pandemic.

Interviews from past Play Dates are marked as “***”.

MEDIA (Print): Science focused interview by Sloan Science & Film

Science & Film: Both MOSQUITOES and THE CHILDREN feature scientists as characters. What aspect of being a scientist interests you?

Lucy Kirkwood: What I became interested in was how lay people interact with science. With THE CHILDREN I was thinking [about how] even scientists are people who have lovers, and husbands, and wives, and children. I was much more interested in the domestic, psychological, romantic, and philosophical aspects of those people rather than necessarily their professions, although their professions are where their power lies. I’m quite interested in science as power.

S&F: Did you give any specific direction to the actors as to how to play a scientist?

LK: I don’t give direction to actors at all really. First, because that’s more of the director’s role and second, what you want is for the person to bring the character to life. I’m lucky enough to work with actors of such an extraordinary caliber that they tell me much more about the characters than I can tell them.

S&F: Was there any research in particular that helped you understand nuclear energy?

LK: I always think you do the amount of research that allows you to write the play credibly. The research isn’t the reason for writing the play. When we were rehearsing the original production we had a really brilliant nuclear engineer come in and talk to us. I did read Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich. It’s a book about Chernobyl and what happened afterward. It is a brilliant book–it’s worth reading in it’s own right. Beyond that, I have to say there was less time spent on scientific research for THE CHILDREN than MOSQUITOES.

I had a very long process writing [MOSQUITOES]. I read a lot of books and tried to absorb a lot of science and have retained probably one percent of it. Right at the beginning [the Sloan Foundation and Manhattan Theatre Club] sent me off down to the particle collider down in Brookhaven.

S&F: Why did you choose nuclear power as a subject?

LK: I’m not fundamentally that interested in the ins and outs of nuclear power. The play itself is not a sort of debate about the rights and wrongs of it. What happened is that I had been trying to write about the environment more broadly for a really long time and I’d been struggling to find the form and the dramatic vessel for that. Then Fukushima happened in 2013 and I read about the nuclear task force going back to help out. Suddenly, it became very clear in my head that there was a way of talking about human intervention in the environment, the brilliant inventions that our brains have created over the course of human history, and what the consequences, responsibilities, and expected outcomes of those are and how to grapple with them. I think this is something we are dealing with in a much broader way in our culture right now. So the nuclear power station became a really handy metaphor for all such things.

S&F: There was one line from THE CHILDREN that stuck out for me: Hazel is talking to Rose about meeting a geneticist and describing her work to him. She laughs at how he pretended to know what she was talking about in this “dumb show of comprehension.” Where did that phrase come from?

LK: At certain times we’ve all done that when confronted with something we feel we should understand and don’t. I think that particular story is probably about a man of a certain generation as well. There is a gender distinction–I hesitate to use the word “mansplaining” because I find it terrible, but I think there’s an aspect of that here–of course I understand what you’re saying, because I am infinitely more knowledgeable. And actually the joy of the moment is when Hazel is much cleverer than him. I think we all know what that looks like, whatever our profession is, of being in a conversation with someone who has just pretended to understand and doesn’t actually understand.

S&F: With THE CHILDREN playing in both the UK and US–you have the same fantastic actors–have you noticed any major differences in the audience response?

LK: I’m very glad that we didn’t try and do an Americanized production of it. [Manhattan Theatre Club] programmed the play shortly before Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, and I have no desire to make lecturing theatre. I’m not interested in doing that. I think those conversations are really alive in both countries, and across the Western world at the moment, so that felt in some ways very similar. It’s always interesting to me to note where the different laughs are, where the different moments of connection are. I notice [in New York] there is a bigger response to a set up, punch line structure; I think it’s much more in the culture. That’s a tiny observation, it’s not particularly significant, but it’s just sort of interesting once you’ve been to one production of the play and seen it mounted you have stored in your body the audience response so you notice when it comes in different places. It’s been a really interesting experiment actually to transfer the play, and bring it to that different audience and see where the similarities are and the differences.

• NYT Feature and Interview with Lucy Kirkwood on Broadway Opening of THE CHILDREN.

Don’t Despair, Protest: Playwright Lucy Kirkwood Sees No Other Choice

The British playwright Lucy Kirkwood gets the jitters on opening nights, and it was no different earlier this month when she made her Broadway debut with “The Children.” But at the post-show party, at a blues club near Times Square, politics proved an unexpectedly pleasant distraction.

It was election night in Alabama, and as word of Roy Moore’s Senate loss filtered through the crowd, Ms. Kirkwood said she felt that was reason enough to celebrate, no matter what the critics turned out to think.

“Despair is not an acceptable position,” she said over coffee later that week, “but it’s hard not to feel like the last year has been quite a hopeless time.”

Politically, that is. Artistically, Ms. Kirkwood, 34, is doing more than fine. “The Children,” an eco-drama that transferred from the Royal Court Theater in London to Manhattan Theater Club with its original three-person cast intact, went over beautifully with reviewers. In his rave in The New York Times, Jesse Green called the show “thrilling.”

With a rural coastal setting inspired by East Anglia, where Ms. Kirkwood lives with her husband, the play is on one level a quiet reunion between Hazel and Robin, a married couple, and their old friend Rose. But Rose arrives at their cottage in the wake of a catastrophe at a nuclear power plant caused by a tsunami, an echo of events from 2011 in Fukushima, Japan.

Ms. Kirkwood’s other best known play, which has not come to New York, is the Olivier Award-winning West End hit “Chimerica,” a double portrait of Chinese and American culture with an American news photographer at its center.

Both that work and “The Children” thrum with awareness of the stubborn myopia that lets comfortable people stay comfortable by refusing to acknowledge, even to themselves, the big-picture impact of their actions. More recently, she’s written a Brexit-themed play called “Mosquitoes,” a science-minded drama about two very different sisters that opened in July at the National Theater in London.

The day before she flew back to Britain, Ms. Kirkwood sat down to talk in the lobby of a Midtown hotel. Chatty and keen, she said straight off that she’d gotten up at 5:30 a.m. to clean out the refrigerator in her temporary apartment, and that for her last night in New York she was thinking of seeing Sarah DeLappe’s soccer play “The Wolves.”

Only after well over an hour did she mention that she’s press-shy. What? “Yeah, yeah,” Ms. Kirkwood said. “I’ll worry about this for, like, weeks — that I’ve expressed myself badly.”

Nah, she did great. This is an edited and condensed version of the interview.

“The Children” is a play filled with dread. What scares you?

I am frightened, as we all are, about things we can’t control. Often drama comes out of people in moments they’ve lost control of. It’s very interesting to watch someone try and cope with what the world is throwing at them.

When did you start writing “The Children”?

I’d been trying for a very long time to find a way to write about climate change. And I wanted to make it driven by emotion rather than intellect. Then the events of Fukushima happened, the terrible disaster there. There was a retired work force that volunteered to go back to clear up the plant there. And apparently the entire country sort of voluntarily monitored their own energy usage. They managed to bring down their national energy usage just because everyone was diligent and considerate and thought about themselves as part of something bigger.

I find the idea of Britain doing that completely unthinkable. What we’re sort of battling is individualism, because you simply cannot deal with a lot of the things that we’re going to have to be dealing with in the next 50 to 100 years if you think about yourself as an individual, if countries think about themselves as individual countries. They’re going to be global issues.

What’s inspiring to you in this cultural moment?

I’m very interested in protest movements. I believe in protest. What is really inspiring about the protest movement now is it’s all built on consensus, sharing power.

“Chimerica” is partly about protest. Are you surprised that that play wasn’t your big American splash?

Whether we brought it here was in our control, and we just made the decision not to. I’m very, very conscious and hopefully sensitive about the fact that that play, if you were of a mind to, you could say there’s cultural appropriation going on here — and not just of one country but two countries, because I’m neither Chinese nor American. You do take on a responsibility when you write another culture. But we sort of have to be brave enough to try.

I’m shocked that anyone would think writing about America could even be cultural appropriation, because we export so much.

Bringing over our idea of an American photojournalist — I think there was a risk involved in it. If you wrote a play tomorrow that was about the English and came over with your American director, I might go, “Hang on a minute, you’ve got that a bit wrong.” So it’s a sticky area. But I know what you’re saying, because we’re all part of American culture in such a massive way. Half the play is written off me watching “All the President’s Men” and “His Girl Friday.”

You write really substantial women. Is that important to you?

Writing Rose and Hazel was an attempt to look at the psychology of older women with a kind of depth that they don’t normally get tended to with. We have a lot of illusion of evolution at the moment. The idea that if you just change the gender of a character — if you have a male paradigm and you just slot a female actor into it — that to me is not evolution. You’re still forming the world with male psychology. You’re still saying, “This is how the world works.”

The level it happens on a lot is those massive franchise movies. Does your protagonist have a singular aim that they are just following all the way through? Immediately you are telling a story which has been conceived in a masculine paradigm. The structure of “The Children” is a real attempt to unpick that a little bit. You don’t find out until quite late in the play why Rose is there. It’s not about someone coming in and going, within the first 10 minutes, “I’m here with a mission.” You don’t have to tell a story like that.

Does “Mosquitoes” feel to you related to “The Children”?

“Mosquitoes” was a commission from M.T.C. That’s how I originally had a relationship with them. It’s a Sloan commission, so the commission was to write a science play. I don’t have a scientific brain, so I don’t think I would have naturally gone there. For sure I think there’s probably a very slight umbilical cord connecting the plays.

What does it mean to be frightened of science and what does it mean to have fear whipped up in you about science? I really had to write “Mosquitoes” when Brexit happened. This is just about how a middle-class, liberal, intellectual class has failed the other class in our country because we haven’t stopped to explain our ideas clearly enough to them in a way that isn’t alienating.

Is it possible right now to be a playwright and not be political?

Theater is a political act in itself. It runs on the promotion of empathy. All you’re doing every time is trying to tell a story to an audience that nourishes them in some way. It’s communion.

MEDIA (Print): StageBuddy Conversation with Lucy Kirkwood Regarding THE CHILDREN.

Playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s vivid, thought-provoking West End hit The Children has also made a big impact in New York. Now playing on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club with the original British cast of brilliant theater veterans that includes Francesca Annis, Ron Cook and Deborah Findlay, the play is deeply rooted in character and relationship, unfolds in layers and leads the audience to an unexpected riveting end. Back at home in England, now that the New York production of The Children has opened to rave reviews, Ms. Kirkwood graciously agreed to speak with me via phone; a brief yet rich conversation ensued.

What prompted you to write The Children? Was there a catalyst or an inspiration for this play?

I’d been trying to find a way to write about climate change for a very long time, struggling to find a form or a story or dramatic situation through which to talk about that. Then an event similar to the one depicted in the play happened in Fukushima in 2013. I found that to be a horrendous event, but when I heard that there was a retired nuclear task force going back to help clear it up, I found that sort of lit a little fire in my brain and that meant that the rest of the play came quite quickly after that.

The Children’s plot gradually unfurls, bit by bit and some have described the play as a slow burn. Did you approach the telling and crafting of The Children in a particular way? For example, was your writing process different for The Children than for some of your other plays?

It’s the first play I’ve written that is sort of Aristotelian, that means in a sense unity of time and place. A lot of my other work has a lot of time frames in them and [take place] in certain different locations. The characters [in The Children] travel a long way in about an hour and fifty minutes and so it was very important to me…I wanted them to do that realistically and at the speed that a human body moves, I suppose. They all decide to make some very momentous decisions in the course of the play. But it’s very important that you’re accurate and precise and that you take the time to watch people make those decisions, and I think look at the things they’re wrestling with. That’s what drama is…looking at human beings under pressure trying to do things that they find difficult. I’m a massive admirer of Kenneth Lonergan; he’s one of my favorite writers. His work is so much about people traveling a short distance with enormous effort. I think that’s what we’re watching on stage in The Children as well.

How did you become a playwright? What do you deem necessary in the education and development of a playwright?

I think you become a playwright by writing plays. And if you’re lucky enough to have them performed that’s…that’s the definition. I don’t personally believe there’s any other formal education necessary beyond that. I think you guys have a very different culture. There are less kind of playwriting courses over here although there are certainly more and more springing up. I think I’m of the school that you can certainly teach them to be a better writer, but you can’t teach them to be a writer in the first place.

Is the theater a great platform for social activism? What are the challenges in writing a play about an important social issue?

I think that any play that considers itself first and foremost social activism is probably going to be a really dreadful play. (Laughs) So I think I’m interested in writing about how I perceive the wider world around me and what we are being consumed with. What are we all spending our time and concerns with, what are we troubled by and wrestling with so that means that by definition those are social issues, aren’t they? Large social issues. But you have to be….some of my earlier work I look back on and find it far too didactic and far too overtly political in that way. I’m much more interested in how the stage is a metaphor. People are always asking me questions about nuclear power, private conversations about nuclear power. This play has nothing to do with nuclear power whatsoever…it is a larger metaphor for human intervention into the environment and what the consequences of that are and how we’re grappling with those consequences and our responsibility to those things. To me the most important element of any kind of theater is metaphor. So absolutely I think you can talk about large issues but unless you employ your craft, to make your play something other than a pamphlet, then it’s not going to be a particularly edifying theatrical experience.

I love that, pamphlet vs. play? That’s a wonderful comparison. You’ve worked as a teaching artist, teaching playwriting in prisons. Has this experience had any impact on your writing?

I’m hesitant to call myself a teaching artist. I really don’t feel qualified in that area. But you’re absolutely right; I have done some workshops in prisons. In a very short form way. I was resident writer with Clean Break [a theater company that works with women in the criminal justice system in and out of prison, doing both artistic and education work]. I have a long relationship with that company, really believe in what they’re doing and enjoy supporting them. I’m influenced I guess in that I wrote a play while I was there. Talking to women there, thinking about issues of women and the criminalization of women…so that’s certainly a very direct way it’s influenced me. Beyond that I am always interested in women in society and the ways in which economic and culture factors impact on their lives. Prison gives a particular insight into that, a very sharp end into the way women are treated throughout society. But I want to be clear; being a teaching artist is such an incredible profession, that I’m wary of claiming those laurels…good teachers are some of the people I admire the most.

If you could invite a playwright or theater artist who has passed on over for dinner, who would you invite and what would you talk about?

Oh gosh, that’s a good question. I’d be very interested to meet Ruth Gordon, an actress you’re probably familiar with…Harold and Maude. But she was also a playwright, she was a writer in a very exciting part of the twentieth century. I suspect her life intersected with a lot of very interesting people. And also she strikes me as being kind of blast! I read her autobiography recently and I thought, “That’s a dame I’d like to hang out with!” So I’ll invite Ruth Gordon, if that’s all right.

MEDIA (Video): Broadway.com Conversation with Lucy Kirkwood Regarding THE CHILDREN.

MEDIA (Audio) - BBC Radio Interview with Lucy Kirkwood On THE CHILDREN

MEDIA (Audio): Melbourne Theatre Company Interview with Lucy Kirkwood on THE CHILDREN.

MEDIA (Video): THE CHILDREN Post-Show Q&A with Lucy Kirkwood at the Royal Court

***MEDIA (Video): Interview by Dan Rebellatoo.

GLOSSARY

• “Not really wedding talk is it, fission? …yes, and he nodded and smiled…”

• “…the never-ending whatsit” -

• Archimedes - Greek Mathematician who reportedly proclaimed "Eureka! Eureka!" after he had stepped into a bath and noticed that the water level rose, whereupon he suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced must be equal to the volume of the part of his body he had submerged. He then realized that the volume of irregular objects could be measured with precision, a previously intractable problem. He is said to have been so eager to share his discovery that he leapt out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse.

• Cagoule - British term for a lightweight, weatherproof raincoat or anorak with a hood, which often comes in knee-length form.

• “Sorry don’t get it done, dude.” - John Wayne line from RIO BRAVO.

• “Twenty-five” (on the Geiger counter - 3-25 uSv (microSieverts) per hour is the average dose received by nuclear workers.

• Skol - Scandinavian term for “good cheer”.

• Croesus - Greek king of Lydia, known for his wealth. Inherited vast fortune from his father who had acquired it from tax revenues. Minted the first known gold coin.

• Weimar Berlin - Berlin became the 3rd largest municipality in the world in the 1920’s due to an expansion of the city. It was a leader in arts and sciences and developed a reputation for decadence trhough its tolerance of many “immoral” sexual behaviors.

• Button Moon - British children’s television show of the 1980s.

• J-cloth - Environmentally friendly alternative to paper towels.

• Gerondissa - Russian icon whose name means “eldress”.

• The Crystal Maze - British game show first broadcast in 1990, hosted by the creator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Crystal Maze is divided up into four different "zones" set in various periods of time and space. A team of contestants take part in a series of challenges in order to win "time crystals". Each crystal gives the team five seconds of time inside "The Crystal Dome", the centerpiece of the maze where the contestants take part in their final challenge. The maze cost £250,000 to build and was the size of two football pitches. At its height the show was the most watched on Channel 4, regularly attracting between 4 and 6 million viewers. In 2006 and again in 2010, the show was voted "greatest UK game show of all time". It has been revived regularly with the latest version ending in 2020.

• Tacker mortgage - A tracker mortgage usually follows the Bank of England base rate to determine how much interest you will pay on your mortgage. Tracker mortgage interest rates can go up or down which means they can be particularly attractive when the base rate is low. 

• Piccalilli - A British interpretation of South Asian pickles, a relish of chopped and pickled vegetables and spices. Here used as a term of endearment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• 2005 - Grady Hot Potato

• 2006 - Geronimo (The Umbilical Project)

• 2007 - Guns or Butter

• 2008 - Tinderbox

• 2008 - 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover

• 2008 - Hedda

• 2009 - it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now

• 2009 - Psychochoreography

• 2010 - Beauty and the Beast

• 2012 - NSFW

• 2013 - Chimerica

• 2016 - The Children

• 2107 - Mosquitos

• 2020 - The Welkin

• 2021 - Maryland