Video transcript: On Instagram, I wrote that I thought The Children [Lyric Hammersmith] was underwhelming, and by that I mean it was okay.
It didn’t wow me. It didn’t make me go: ‘That was amazing.’ It was all right.
It’s very well acted, and the production is great. You can’t fault either of those things at all. It just takes a very long time to get to the meat of the story.
It’s about a couple who used to work in a [nuclear] power station. There was a disaster at the power station. It’s now an exclusion zone, fallout, all of that kind of stuff, and a former colleague and friend comes to visit them and has a request of them.
And the meat of the story is about whether older people should sacrifice themselves for the good of the younger generation, which is an interesting idea.
But it just feels that by the time we get there, it kind of feels like it’s all a bit over by that point.
It doesn’t feel like a really proper, meaty debate and discussion.
The resolution seems to happen relatively easily and relatively quickly.
So yeah, it was a bit underwhelming.
Be interested to know what other people thought of it.
Review: The Children, Lyric Hammersmith
Written by Lucy Kirkwood
Directed by Rachel O’Riordan
Cast: Meera Syal, Kerry Fox, Declan Conlon
Running time: 90 minutes without an interval
Booking until 3 October
Read on…
Review: The Story, National Theatre booking until 24 October
Leave a Reply