By Krishen Vaya

How much do we owe to the future? As anxieties about existential, man-made threats once again dominate the headlines, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children feels as relevant as ever. Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the play strands three retired nuclear scientists in a cottage in the aftermath of a disaster, forcing buried secrets and questions of generational responsibility to the surface.

At the centre of the drama are three complicated characters, brought to life by three excellent performances. The brilliant Meera Syal gives Hazel a wonderfully brittle composure. Ostensibly in control, Hazel’s anxiety about ageing – and her own mortality – emerges through small, revealing details: her yoga, the salad she spends most of the play making, her determination to pluck away the chin hairs that threaten to expose her age. These touches are funny, but there is something sad beneath them. Hazel is fighting to keep a sense of purpose in her next stage of life, unwilling to be washed away by the tide of age like her parents were.

Kerry Fox is a force as Rose, whose child-and-mortgage-free lifestyle stands as a seemingly hedonistic antithesis to Hazel. Her arrival at the cottage after decades gallivanting in America, immediately disturbs the fragile peace married couple Hazel and Robin have established. But in this unexpected return – and her somewhat flustered disposition – lingers an ambiguity: why has she come back now, and what does she want from them?

Declan Conlon’s arrival as Robin shifts the dynamic again. He brings a blustery energy that, paired with his infamous parsnip wine, lowers the women’s guardedness. His playful, occasionally mean-spirited flirting draws an unexpected vulnerability from Rose, while Hazel responds with a harder edge.

The three actors work particularly well together, subtly exposing the resentment and guilt beneath Kirkwood’s witty exchanges. These moments when the characters’ masks slip provide the play with much-needed intrigue, leaving the audience to constantly question whether their behaviour is genuinely sincere or quietly self-serving.

Yet, despite this, the production fails to bring meaningful progression, allowing interesting ideas to circle the drain for a little too long without ramping up the tension into sustained dramatic pressure. So while The Children remains an interesting and surprisingly funny piece, it lacks the necessary electricity to elevate the ending to something truly memorable.

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The Children runs at the Lyric Hammersmith until 3 October – https://lyric.co.uk/shows/the-children/