I’ll have to think about them a bit more …

This interesting thing I found in discussions afterwards was that all of us had interpreted the play in different ways depending on our own personal life situations.

Most of the member of my family assumed that the family with the priest and son was the real family and that the family with the daughter and lover was the fantasy and as a consequence of Susan’s hallucinations she was incarcerated at the end.

For me, the play seemed to hit a chord a little different to everyone else’s. From the beginning I thought that perhaps neither of the families represented her real family as both were extremes. Susan’s back garden too was not necessarily real either, rather a fertile patch of her inner world which rotated between being narrow and overbearing to fertile and romantic much the way life ebbs and back and forth for someone suffering from bi-polar tendencies.

The problem of time and it’s relation to reality was also a point on which my family and I disagreed. I wondered whether the interactions between Susan and her family members occurred prior to or during her incarceration.

If we take the view that they occurred prior to her incarceration, then we feel sympathetic towards the family who were unable to cope with caring for ill Susan who hallucinated a wonderful house and family. We laugh at the bumbling family doctor and the aunt who are unable to help in any way more practical than bringing endless cups of tea and coffee and a few mild sedatives.

If we take the view that they occurred during Susan’s incarceration, then we suppose that Susan has a warped perception of their visitations because she is too engrossed with her imagined inner world. The changing sex of her child, or maybe she did in fact have two children… or maybe one child who was indeed married or getting married…. ahhh, it is impossible to know!

Here different questions arise as the aunt’s could very well have been a nurse at the hospital… we don’t know because we are only privy to her subjective world and not an objective one. If this was the case then the odd things that happened with the aunt’s meals and tea could very well have been hallucinations caused by schizophrenia.

If this domestic world was entirely fantasy, then were the lighting effects the result of her madness or a reaction to medication? This is uncertain.

If we take the view that none of the interactions with family members occurred at all, then we might also be inclined to think that the hospitalization was such a bleak reality that Susan was forced to create a preferable inner world to cope with it. Here the lies a true tragedy…. madness resulting from intended cure!

Then there is the question of whether the incarceration occurred at all! Or was it symbolic of the trap of mental illness???

At the end of the play I did come out with a feeling that no matter which of the above represented Susan’s objective reality, the important thing for her was for her to have her family with her, be in a home environment and to not to be left suffering alone.