Royal Scots Club (Venue 241): Mon 4 Aug – Sat 9 Aug 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar
Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group’s late show at the Royal Scots Club, Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, is a bleak and thoughtful look at everyday life in the wake of a disaster, and the choices its survivors must make.
Opening in the ordinary-looking home of sexagenarian couple Hazel (Wendy Mathison) and Robin (Richard Godden), the lights come up on Rose (Hilary Spiers), an old friend of a similar age who has dropped in. “How are the children?” she asks, attempting to stem the nosebleed that has strained her blouse.
Wendy Mathison, Richard Godden and Hilary Spiers in The Children. Pic Minny Fletcher-Watson
Hazel and Rose exchange small talk and banter, including discussion of Hazel and Robin’s children whom, she says, “we haven’t seen since the disaster, of course.” This dropped in casually into the conversation, Kirkwood begins to create the context of the world of the play, where it transpires a disaster has taken place: a one in ten million fault sequence; a wave, heralded by shaking eggs; a meltdown at the nearby power station.
Just outside the exclusion zone, this trio of nuclear physicists who helped build the power station reunite after nearly forty years— or so Hazel thinks. As the play progresses, the details of their pasts are revealed, their tangled interpersonal threads, and the decision each will take when given the chance to make the power station safe for future generations.
David Grimes’s direction (assisted by Amy Dallas) of The Children is strong and specific, making full use of the set by Michael Mulligan and Richard Spiers, integrating the inherent interest of the Hepburn Suite’s levels. Props by Gillian Burnett fill out the world of the semi-apocalyptic home, familiar and strange at once.
The dialogue clips along at the pace of natural conversation, with hints of Noël Coward in both the writing and delivery. It’s a script peppered with humour amid the drama (“this is how it starts, the slow descent into the coffin, it starts with two black hairs on your chin!”), which its performers relish without hamming it up.
a superb trio
Mathison, Godden, and Spiers are a superb trio, pinging off each other through the rapid portions of the show and earning every pause they take. Each clearly communicates the journey their characters have taken through this real-time piece, and the weight of what they must face after the curtain goes down. The Children is a showcase for elder actors who more often than not only find smaller parts written for them, and EGTG’s cast have risen to the occasion.
A deeply human play that manages to satisfyingly ask more questions than it answers, The Children is a quietly devastating speculation on events and situations that have, and may again, come to pass.
Running time: One hour and 40 minutes (no interval).
Royal Scots Club (The Hepburn Suite), 29-31 Abercromby Place, EH3 6QE (Venue 241).
Mon 4 – Sat 9 August 2025.
Daily: 8.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.
EGTG website: www.theegtg.com
Facebook: @edingrads
Instagram: @edingrads
X: @TheGrads
ENDS