While Mel Cantwell may have been invited by Black Swan State Theatre Company to direct its latest production The Children, it is absolutely a play she would have chosen for herself, citing it as the perfect marriage of director and material.
Written by British playwright Lucy Kirkwood — known for Chimerica, a play exploring the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests — The Children is an atomic drama about social responsibility, partly inspired by the Fukushima disaster in 2011, where retirees volunteered to replace younger workers cleaning up the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant.
Tackling the subject of climate change from an emotional rather than intellectually driven perspective, the three-hander play takes place over the course of an evening at the home of two nuclear scientists, Robin (Humphrey Bower) and Hazel (Nicola Bartlett).
The couple has lived a quiet life in an isolated cottage on the coast ever since “the disaster”.
When old friend and colleague Rose (Caroline Brazier) visits, she stirs up a past they had endeavoured to leave behind, raising the question of both personal and collective responsibility.
![The Children director Mel Cantwell.](https://timesofsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/acbbdc05ce176d4c43d3098e9ab3fec71805ce7e-161x229-x0y207w2667h3793.jpg)
“I think she (Kirkwood) is a genius, frankly,” former Perth Theatre Company artistic director Cantwell states.
“She’s 40 years old, and she’s created this play that just has such incredible depth, and yet it never labours the point. It’s always intriguing, it’s always suggestive, so it’s brilliant material for actors. We keep discovering more and more in it. I think that’s the mark of a great work, where it keeps revealing itself to you, the further and further into it you go.
“I love the way it balances the personal with bigger global questions. It’s all of us today and all the questions that we face, not only about the world, but about how we treat each other and about how those two things are connected.”
The Children premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2016, before opening on Broadway in December of the same year, and since programmed before Australia’s most recent conversation on proposed nuclear power, has found even more relevance to Perth audiences ahead of Black Swan’s August premiere at Heath Ledger Theatre.
“It almost feels prescient, now the nuclear debate has suddenly landed on our doorstep,” WA Academy of Performing Arts graduate and North Perth resident Cantwell says.
![Mel Cantwell is directing Black Swan State Theatre Company play The Children at Heath Ledger Theatre.](https://timesofsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/0ded0ce46ad43c2578593d56dfed638a074a704c-161x229-x0y207w2667h3793.jpg)
“I think, leading up to this moment, it’s been something that’s been experimented with or trialled or discussed in other places. I suspect that that conversation is going to get more relevant and closer, and The Children is a really sharp-eyed look at that issue.”
Cantwell directed Fremantle Theatre Company’s 2022 Perth Festival season of Mary Stuart, where she worked with Brazier and Bower, both actors going on to reunite in Black Swan’s 2023 multi-Performing Arts WA Award-winning production Things I Know To Be True.
“I’ve worked with all three actors before, so I know what each can bring to a complex role, and they are all complex roles,” she says.
“There’s no time where each of the characters isn’t in conflict with themselves or each other, so it requires actors of a calibre who can switch inside an idea or a moment and be truthful and honest with it. I know they can all do that.
“It’s lovely to be working with Black Swan and it’s lovely to be working on such an intimate piece. The ability to be in a room with three actors, in a really concentrated narrative is, in a lot of ways, my favourite way to work, because you really do get to have some fantastically rich discussions and discoveries. It’s such a suspenseful and profound piece.”