I had a cousin who took his life. The night before going to see Romeo and Juliet, I had a dream about him. I woke up deeply affected. I wasn’t sure what had prompted it, but it was a beautiful dream. We talked about his daughter. He was happy.

That evening I went to the theatre with my seventeen‑year‑old son for a play I had seen before and read many times – most recently working through it line by line with my daughter as part of her schoolwork – and watched on screen in the superb Baz Luhrmann rendition. A wonderful, lyrical play which I had always experienced in the context of adolescent love, pointless feuds and rash decisions.

I was really looking forward to the experience. Being somewhat awe‑struck by Robert Icke’s brilliance, I was expecting something special. What I was not expecting was to leave the Harold Pinter sobbing uncontrollably. Because what Icke’s interpretation brought out was something I had never fully appreciated. Romeo and Juliet is not just a play about young love cut short; it is a play about the life never had.

It sounds so obvious now that I have written it down.

There’s a particular kind of devastation that comes from hearing, every single day, about children killed in yet another airstrike. You try to mute it, to nudge it out of your conscious mind, because otherwise how do you get through the day? But however firmly you think you’ve shut those thoughts away, they may become dormant, but remain ever present.

The sparse scenography and the stellar acting work like a surgical scalpel, cutting through your defences. Seeing this performance brought it all to the surface – the senseless, pointless tragedy we are slowly being immunised against but must never allow ourselves to be.

Walking home from the bus stop, my son and I stopped, embraced, and wept.