Transcending

This one-act play takes a critical look at family relationships within a coventional middle class framework, and draws attention to the inability to communicate effectively. It presents a satirical view of the traditional nuclear family, depicting adults, usually supposed to command respect and authority as figures of ridicule. All of them have a distinct, grossly exaggerated psychological deficiency, and are unable to offer help and guidance to the girl, whose failiure to pass her A-Levels is symbolic of a wider incapacity for success. Her final escape from this bourgeois madhouse environment with its sham notions of integrity is - to quote psychologist Carl Jung - "a release from - or transcendence of - a confiing pattern of existence", an act of liberation based on the "realization of the potential of the individual self".