British Playwright Lucky Kirkwood's THE CHILDREN - Brilliant, Blistering and Unsettling

THE CHILDREN by Lucky Kirkwood (b UK 1984) is a play with a radioactive power that gets under your skin leaving an indelible mark.  It's both an understated & fierce play that acts as an  awakening and a reckoning.  Kirkwood's scathing writing holds us accountable for our lives and the lives we leave for the next generation.  The three character one act play is set in a cottage in the English countryside not far from a nuclear power plant.  The play opens with Rose (Francesca Annis) bleeding profusely from her nose while Hazel (Deborah Findlay) tries her best to stem the flow while apologizing for having caused the accident.  Rose inadvertently startled Hazel with her surprise visit after not being in touch for 30 some years.  The clever set of a ramshackle kitchen cottage is poised off kilter and framed with a dark border.  This adds to the taught feelings of constraint and mounting tension.  Rose's visit with Hazel & her husband Robin (Ron Cook) is unexpected and perhaps somewhat unwelcome.  The loquacious banter billows from the mundane questioning regarding Hazel's children leaking towards the toxic underlying vitriol that has poisoned their relationships.  Rose, Hazel & Robin were all among the technical engineers that launched the nuclear power plant decades prior.  It just recently had a major meltdown.  Mayhem and destruction plagues the area from its radioactive release threatening lives & sustainability.  Over the drawn out course of tea to supper to lights out, much is revealed including the adulterous affair between Rose and Robin.  Hazel raised 4 children while working at the nuclear plant.  Hazel & Robin also have grandchildren.  Rose never had children.  Her inquiry after the couple's children & grandchildren is the harkening to one's legacy and the existential threat of leaving a viable world for future generations.  Rose voluntarily returned to aid in the clean-up and is seeking other volunteers.  She is seeking those who are older or without children to replace younger workers.  The clean-up will most certainly be lethal for those involved but left unresolved, a massive fatal fallout will occur.  Kirkwood's multilayered messaging is carpe diem; dance, love, live life in a constantly changing world.  Moreover, she's sounding an alarm.  Kirkwood tolls the foreboding bell loudly; take ownership of the shit we leave behind and clean up our messes before there isn't a future left for our children & our children's children.  "I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." (Donne)   THE CHILDREN is a play all need to see.