Albert's Bridge: A Review

"I can't help it. I'm forced up and coaxed down. I'm a victim of perspective." So says Frazier in a neat summation of Stoppard's radio play, "Albert's Bridge." Frazier is a potential suicide who periodically climbs up on the bridge to jump in his despair over the circumstances he faces in the world only to find his despair dissipates once he is far above the circumstances of his life. He then climbs down, only to have his despair return when life's pressures are again close at hand. So he is constantly ascending and descending the bridge.

 

The main character is Albert, a scholar who has become a bridge painter. And, of course, when he is done the job, it is time to start again. He prefers the job and its distance to his real life with his wife and child which is too messy and complicated. The geometry and structure of the bridge is soothing and intellectually appealing to him, the distance of the rest of the world makes it distinct and manageable.

 

That world is, of course, impossible for his wife Kate and their child whose experience of life is active and demanding. 

Kate: I saw you today ... coming out of the hairdressers. Six and six, I had it cut.

Albert: Just goes to show - if you get far enough away, six and sixpence doesn't show, and nor does anything, at a distance.

Kate: Well, life is all close up isn't it?

Albert: Yes, it hits you when you come back down.

 

In the background is the logic of the economic world, which has its own perspective. The town council thinks it is terribly inefficient for one worker to work forever on a bridge when many could do it all at once. This would increase employment and efficiency. So they bring hundreds of painters out to do the job--and inadvertently collapse the bridge.

 

These oppositional perspectives have, each one, their own value. But, like The Cave, none are complete and thus are inaccurate. The dialectic approach so prized by philosophy implies a resolution of debate, often with the destruction of the losing position. But assessing life by one of these single parameters is like assessing a baseball game with a single score.