Ten years after the Royal Court first staged it, The Children has returned to London at the Lyric Hammersmith, with Meera Syal, Kerry Fox and Declan Conlon as three retired nuclear physicists living just outside an exclusion zone of their own making. Rachel O’Riordan directs Lucy Kirkwood’s ninety-minute three-hander, and the notices agree almost completely on the playing — Syal’s deadpan, unsettled Hazel and Fox’s nervy Rose draw admiring write-ups everywhere — and hardly at all on the play. Time Out finds its climate argument sharper than it was in 2016; BroadwayWorld finds the same argument quaint; The Telegraph is unconvinced the trio read as scientists at all. What nobody disputes is Gary McCann’s set, a wooden cottage framed inside the curve of a reactor tunnel.
The verdict: seven reviews so far — one five-star notice, one at four, four at three, and one outlet that publishes no rating. Across the six that do score, the average is 3.5 out of 5. Every one of them praises the acting and Gary McCann’s design; where they part company is on the play itself, and on whether a nuclear parable written in 2016 still lands ten years on.
What are critics saying about THE CHILDREN?
West End Best Friend
Reviewer: Chris Abbott
“Completing this trio of accomplished actors is the peerless Meera Syal as Hazel, shoeless and unsettled, attempting to focus on home life but always unsettled by the outside world she tries to shun. At first amusing, and adept as always at the well-delivered one-liner, she gradually reveals the bitter emptiness of a life without purpose and a family lost. Her eventual decision is heart-breaking, her face crumpling, but is also essentially true to the character, who Syal makes totally believable.”
LondonTheatre.co.uk
“Lucy Kirkwood’s post-apocalyptic drama feels sharper than ever”
Reviewer: Anya Ryan
“As a trio, Syal, Conlon and Fox have the easy, knowing chemistry of people who have spent years in each other's company. Syal and Conlon slip from insulting each other to moments of real tenderness and need without a second thought, while Fox captures Rose’s lingering lust for Robin – particularly when he lights up a cigarette. When crunch time comes, and Hazel has a decision to make, Syal curls in on herself, almost childlike, and tells stories about how she still longs for her mum. No matter how old we get, we’re still made up of our younger versions – never quite ready to say goodbye to the people we once were.”
Time Out
“Lucy Kirkwood’s ominous drama about a decaying British future has only grown in relevance with this tenth anniversary revival”
Reviewer: Tom Wicker
“Syal’s Hazel, dressed in muted, earthy tones, is prickly and defensive, wielding a tight smile, yoga and healthy living as her defence against Rose’s incursion. Fox is nervy, frustration fuelling her too-loud laughter and as out of place in the couple’s tautly beige domesticity as her blue jacket. As Robin, Conlon rolls in with a forced jollity that deflates like a punctured balloon. O’Riordan often has them speaking over each other, nicely heightening the sense of conversation as evasion.”
BroadwayWorld
Reviewer: Clementine Scott
“There is still a rich seam of tragicomic humour here, and the two lead actresses tap into it to great effect: Syal as a deadpan woman on the verge, passive-aggressively winding up her electricity generator, Fox as a social misfit who’s not quite aware her jokes aren’t landing. The character of Hazel’s husband, another scientist who’s also had a romantic entanglement with Rose, is less convincing, but Declan Conlon imbues the character with a sense of hardwon personal philosophies and repressed sexual tension.”
Theatre Weekly
“The power these actors hold when discussing the play’s nuclear themes is staggering.”
Reviewer: Finlay Clench
“Examining a community outside the exclusion zone of a nuclear power station emergency, writer Lucy Kirkwood places a family setting within this sphere of high tension. Meera Syal, as Hazel, is the stubborn matriarch, as she comes to loggerheads with the silently flawed and obviously ill Robin (Declan Conlon). And then there is the odd one out, Rose (Kerry Fox), who becomes adamant that there is a need for action to resolve the mistakes committed by this volatile trio. They are three engineers from the old plant, but also three who form a sort of family. Drama and high relationship stakes combine with nuclear struggle and risk to form an unmatched power.”
Production photographs by Helen Maybanks.
Also reviewed by: The Stage (Dave Fargnoli, three stars, “Urgent and unsettling”) and The Telegraph (Fiona Mountford, three stars, “A nuclear meltdown, a moral dilemma – so why is it so hard to care?”), whose reviews sit behind paywalls.
For more of what the critics have been saying this week, our recent roundups cover Kimberly Akimbo at Hampstead Theatre and Jane Eyre at Southwark Playhouse Elephant.
The Children runs at the Lyric Hammersmith until Saturday 3 October 2026. The production runs for one hour and thirty minutes without an interval.
