The Children Act

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.

Fiona Mayes’s piano is symbolic of freedom and escape. The piano is located in her sitting room at home and is covered in “the silver-framed photos it support[s] in country-house style” (25). In Chapter 1, Fiona mentally retreats from a conversation with Jack about their marriage in order to study the piano. Her focus on the piano instead of on Jack suggests that she feels trapped in her marriage. Staring at the instrument and the photographs on its top is a manifestation of her longing for freedom. Furthermore, the framed photos on the piano mirror Fiona’s self-imposed containment. The photos present discrete, contained moments in time, echoing the self-containment Fiona practices at the court. She is as trapped as the images in their frames.

In the scenes where Fiona is physically playing the piano, she is free to transcend the bounds of reality. When she and Mark practice in Chapter 5, Fiona is glad that for almost an hour she doesn’t have to think or talk about the law. Playing the piano thus lets her escape from her professional worries. This phenomenon is even more acute when Fiona performs her Christmas concert at the end of the novel.