Theatre / “The Children,” by  Lucy Kirkwood,  Chaika Theatre. At ACT Hub, Kingston, until September 9. Reviewed by ARNE FEALING.

THE play starts in the middle of a conversation.

Destabilising, impossible to get your grounding, the bird’s-eye view into its action gives very little to cleave to. Just emotions, characters and a set.

Playwright Lucy Kirkwood does not give that to you gently. It happens with a moment of awakening and deliberately metes out the information, through conversation between Hazel (Karen Vickery) and Rose (Lainie Hart). War or peace, friendship – or a long hard look at each other through the lens of their history.

Fluid and flawless direction by Tony Knight drew out every drop of tension and release in this play about lives.

Reliable as the weather on the coast of Victoria, conversation and emotion becomes the undercurrent of the script. Slowly motivating its eventual drop into a choice that no one can make, because it feels like it must be impossible.

The narrative and dramatic tension of this play was able to provide a life for itself, Vickery and Hart the world. Their chemistry was gentle, familiar. Feeling as real as a memory of your best friends talking across a dinner table after coffee – Vickery and Hart stepped into their personas and gave it to the audience to soak up.

With the addition of a third element (Michael Sparks as Robin), who builds a calm within the fascinating storm, making a salad might seem to be the only thing you could do to expunge the feelings that were building up.

About continuing to find meaning and truth among the conditions of a life already half lived – harmonising and clashing with the other souls around it – love, self-interest and pain take over to give the play some extraordinarily deep moments of excitement, pain, joy and conflict.

Delivering this was a masterclass in controlled acting from all three performers. You might as well go off to the National Gallery or quietly observe the new architecture next to the ACT Hub afterwards to understand the quality of art on show.

On stage, as part of this play – someone needs to give team a bottle of ambrosia and say – drink it down. Thank you, Chaika Theatre, for making this show exist.