It does this while simultaneously offering a vision of parallel lives, a world separate from the choices and expectations of their children. Even as a fictionalised story, it shows us theatre as both a mirror of life, as well as a doorway to life. In my view, at its core, this is a compelling tale about a man, a family really, in need of sympathy and understanding for trying too hard to succeed, instead of receiving callousness and dismissal for failing! It is at once, a theatrical depiction of how life was lived, a disguised social commentary on modern life, and at the same time, a symbolic portrayal of others elsewhere, but just like us. That is often also how children are. And no matter how many children we raise (or how much theatre we see), every one of them yields a new meaning, relevance and understanding of life – just like theatre.
Children come to us parents, largely unprepared and thus compel an adjustment and alteration in our lives. Yet, the exquisite abidingness between their lives and ours harmonises the essential interplay between a child and a parent, each enriching the other, and each magnifying the completeness of life, from which all existence springs. As with theatre, children make us parents recognise ourselves. In fact, although they may not be an exact copy of us – like Biff and Happy as children in the aforementioned drama – they can be a rendition of both the facts of our existence and their import for us.
