‘If you’re curious as to how and why cows, nuclear reactors, tricycles, peperami, and old people doing yoga all fit into one play…come and see The Children! It is funny, frightening, and emotional.’ Divya’s response sums up why exactly Cherwell sat down with the team behind Fennec Fox Productions’ recent rendition of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children. The production team of Joshua Robey, Emma Scanlon and Divya Kaliappan helped us to unravel the ‘hidden mysteries’ behind a play centred on themes of climate change and nuclear disaster, while cast members Alice Macey-Dare and Nathaniel Wintraub demonstrated just how they brought this ‘beautifully rich character drama’ to life.
Cherwell: As the play is a bit more niche, please give our readers a brief summary of the plot.
Josh: A nuclear accident (similar to the 2011 Fukushima disaster) has devastated part of the Suffolk coast. Making camp in a borrowed cottage on the edge of the exclusion zone, retired nuclear engineers Hazel and Robin are getting by with unstable electricity, dodgy plumbing, and a gnawing sense of distance growing between them. The unexpected arrival of Rose, a colleague from 40 years earlier, prompts a devastating reckoning for all of the characters. There’s a lot of hidden secrets that Kirkwood finds brilliant ways of revealing throughout the play.
Cherwell: What inspired you to work on The Children and how long have you been thinking about this production?
Josh: I’ve wanted to direct a production of The Children for a few years now. I read it about five years ago and subsequently wrote my master’s dissertation on it along with Kirkwood’s other plays. What’s so intriguing and unusual about it is that it is a play about the climate crisis, but it takes a completely different direction to most other shows about the issue. It’s not solving the problem politically like Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan or Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s Kyoto, nor is it a piece of lecture theatre trying to inform its audience of the facts like 2071 (Duncan Macmillan and Chris Rapley) or A Play For the Living in a Time of Extinction (Miranda Rose Hall). It’s about some technically skilled but also very ordinary people confronting the moral logic of the world around them. It’s a play about how we sit with moral discomfort and turn that into positive action, a theme I’m really drawn to in drama.
Divya: I had already read and watched The Children before applying for the Assistant Director role. The main inspiration came from the idea of working with actors to build up the incredibly complex characters of Hazel, Robin, and Rose – it’s one thing reading a play but watching the characters come to life is really quite special! Helping them to portray old people was a challenge and new for me, and they certainly have a lot of hidden layers.
Emma: I was wrapping up working on a big cast, Early Modern production when I saw the ad on the OUDS portal and was really excited about the idea of working on a small, contemporary show. I read the play and was really captured by Kirkwood’s manner of writing dialogue – the little misunderstandings, odd comments, interruptions, and jokes we make as we talk are so beautifully written so as to be both comical and fun and also devastatingly real. The heavy moments are never weighed down because the voices of the characters are so human and natural that the play – almost entirely dialogue – flows completely.
Alice: As an actor the idea of being in The Children really appealed to me. The opportunity to act such subtle characters whose feelings and motivations are slowly unfurled through their seemingly innocuous interactions seemed wonderfully challenging. Also playing an old person is fun.
Chewell: How have you portrayed the characters in this play? Have you taken any ‘new spins’ on them?
Josh: Kirkwood writes incredibly nuanced characters with such great sensitivity in this play, so a lot of the process has been really digging into the characters as they appear on the page, reconciling their wonderfully human inconsistencies. For example, Hazel is this fantastically generous and caring character who also has a defensive streak of selfishness that emerges sharply at times. Often it’s what seem to be the contradictions that point to the real essence of a character, and finding those with this team has been a delight.
Nate: The play is about three characters in their sixties but there is such a tangible youthfulness to them that it has felt effortless to infuse our own young adult sensibilities into our performances. There’s an added dimension to this play, which is largely about aging, when the actors are young, and it’s been so interesting to think about how we refocus our life as we get older, which is so evident in the text. I think it’s so important that the crew decided not to visually age the characters too much, and instead let the youthful image on stage play out as more of an internal conception of what Rose, Robin, and Hazel ‘look’ like.
Emma: Nothing especially radical but definitely very personal. With a relatively small crew and a very small cast, it’s been great in rehearsal to really get to discuss motivations, intentions, reactions – even things that don’t happen on stage, like the general shape of Robin and Hazel’s marriage or what the moments right before the first line looked like. The cast have been really great at getting into the space of their characters and understanding how they think, and I feel that’s resulted in a unique and, well, personal depiction of all three.
Cherwell: Is interesting costuming and lighting central to this play? How did you play about with ‘setting the scene’?
Josh: All of the characters in the play are in their mid-to-late sixties, so capturing that with a student cast has meant costume is hugely important. Our costume designer Hannah Walton has done a great job capturing this. From early on, we decided we didn’t want to age up the actors in any intrusive ways, and we have kept reminding ourselves throughout that these characters are all young at heart and not that advanced in years, certainly not in how they see themselves. Therefore, we’ve chosen costumes that fit with their demographic while retaining a youthful edge.
The lighting is a vital component in the play and has been since the play was first pitched. Since the nuclear disaster, there have been rolling power cuts, so the lighting is almost all designed to mirror the natural light. We’ve set it in real time starting at 7:30pm on a late-summer evening, so the sunset is conjured through slow, hopefully imperceptible shifts in lighting taking us from daylight to the warm glow of sunset, to the darkening dusk. I’m so excited to see the lighting (from lighting designer Sydney Betancourt) in the space.
Emma: Lighting is absolutely paramount! The show takes place during an August sunset in real time, so you get a sense of the day really slipping away and the night settling in as the play progresses. Costuming is important, to set the right vibe for three people in their sixties being played by students, but we also did some really fun work getting our wonderful cast to act and move like sixty-odd year olds. Lots of chair work and fine-tuning leg crossing or leaning – a lot of things I’d never thought about before but really came to life in the show. Courtesy of our wonderful movement director (also called Emma!).
Cherwell: What scene do you think really encapsulates the essence of the play and why?
Nate: A spoiler-prone question! I’ll answer it by saying there’s a beautiful parallel in the opening and closing parts of the play respectively, where Hazel and Rose briefly speak about their scientific field, nuclear physics, and the inter-scientist mystery of what goes on in other fields. There’s a moment at the end that sort of harkens back to that discussion but also what it is to really be “retired” and the responsibility you have to the things you’ve spent your life on. Made me tear up in rehearsal today!
Emma: Without spoiling anything too special, there’s a beautiful scene where the characters reminisce over a party they went to back when they were all young and working together at the nuclear power station. The scene is such a beautiful break from the tension of the play – it’s not an escape, but it really lays out why and how these people have cared about each other for so long despite all of their difficulties.
Josh: Without spoiling anything, for me, the essence of the play comes in two moments towards the end. One is a beautiful monologue from Robin about cows which I won’t spoil, and another is a speech Rose makes about the kind of person she wanted to be. That speech ends in my favourite line of the play – a moment both incredibly generous and yet wistful for a life not lived. Both moments encapsulate the play’s theme of knowing morally what is right, but the real difficulty of doing the right thing practically and emotionally.
Cherwell: Why should audiences come to see The Children?
Josh: The Children is hilarious and utterly moving. It’s a great chance to see a contemporary play in Oxford, and one that subtly relates to our lives and decisions. It speaks to the climate crisis in a way you’ll likely never have seen before, the actors are truly superb, and you’ll be thinking about the cow speech for weeks to come! I know I will.
Alice: Genuinely one of the most shocking and powerful pieces of theatre I have ever seen let alone been a part of! The characters themselves are incredibly rich in depth giving The Children an emotional impact that cannot be understated.
Nate: I love a piece of tightly written theatre and The Children is about as tight as it gets. It’s been a joy to get to work with this extraordinary text and watch my scene partners decode its density and power. Such a gift to be a part of this production!
Divya: If you’re curious as to how and why cows, nuclear reactors, tricycles, pepperami, and old people doing yoga all fit into one play…come and see The Children! It is funny, frightening, and emotional.
Emma: It’s such an incredible text and I’m so amazed by how beautifully it’s come together – I was nearly in tears just watching one of the rehearsals of some of the more poignant moments – but also it’s a really fresh exploration of our responsibility to each other, especially in the context of the climate crisis. Often those conversations can feel preachy or impossibly bleak, but Kirkwood’s approach leaves so much space for who we are and, especially, what we want in the context of a great environmental (in this case, nuclear) disaster.
Fennec Fox Productions’ The Children is being performed from 4th – 8th February 2025 at the Oxford Playhouse.
Tickets are available here: https://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/events/the-childern
