Presented by KnockOff Theatre

Review by Marina Funcasta

Rosemary Branch Theatre

Two characters stare out at the audience, tired and quiet. But the scene is far from static. Cooped in the front seats of a car, father and daughter scan our faces as if we were motorway signs, traffic lights – or, indeed, flags.
 
‘Operation Raise the Colours’ rippled across the country in 2025, understood by many as a cry for patriotism, but by many more as a movement of anti-immigration. What began with Union Jacks flown from lampposts and painted onto roundabouts soon spilled into public spaces, prompting attention from local councils. When these interventions proved pitiful, individuals took matters into their own hands, removing the flags themselves.
 
It is from this environment that Children of Empire takes its roots, weaving national rupture into the thwarted relationship between a white father and his mixed-race daughter. They become night-time vigilantes, driving their local roads in search of flashes of red and white.
 
For a fifty-minute play, Jake Turner Chan certainly shines in his ambition. His writing is disarmingly subtle, finding its rhythm quickly. Gareth Berliner’s controlled paternalism contrasts with Elise Nguyen’s restless angst. Yet, both faces gawk at the audience, sunken in exhaustion – it is only Nguyen’s whose physicality splinters, as though she has been sat there for hours. Her moment of dancing, well commanded by sound designer Sophie Louise Irving, offer brief attempts at escape from the claustrophobia of the car, while beneath her dad’s composure sits a deep shame. Their exchanges are often endearing, but detached. Moments of tenderness, such as when Berliner remembers a forgotten school fundraiser, are unfortunately scarce: there is little holding the pair together beyond these brief exchanges and their fleeting political paroxysms.
  
The effect is a very earnest production. The fracture between father and daughter mirrors the fracture of the nation around them, yet there is little to make us believe in, or want to fight for, their reconciliation. As the play reveals the effects of addiction and class, it raises an interesting question: how responsible are these two people for their estrangement when their relationship has been shaped by forces larger than themselves? This is a complicated question – especially considering the weight of the political baggage surrounding them, perhaps so heavy that it risks sinking the characters themselves beneath it.

Setting the entire performance inside a car is an effective but restricting choice. At its best, it traps us alongside them, sharing their suffocation while surrounded by the stage’s threatening periphery. At times, however, the car becomes so visually static that the production struggles to escape its own metaphor.

The result is a play that is intellectually and politically engaging, but perhaps compromising its humanity. Caught between a portrait of a fractured family and a fractured nation, it is strongest when the two become inseparable, weaker when political argument replaces emotional connection. The play speaks to a flag which, though silent, speaks deadly volumes of a panic simmering beneath the its surface. This intensity is powerful, but it never quite erupts, creating a restraint which ingeniously echoes the state of the nation, but stifles the production’s dramatic explosivity

---