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by Andrew Bovell, directed by Scott Graham & Geordie Brookman

Frantic Assembly & State Theatre Company South Australia, Lyric Hammersmith, London, GBR

January 11-February 3, 2018

Rosie: “I know that things can’t remain the same no matter how much you want them to”

The latest play by Australian playwright Andrew Bovell is a collaboration between the State Theatre Company South Australia and Britain’s Frantic Assembly.  Things I Know To Be True premiered in Adelaide in May 2016.  Then, recast with British actors, it had its British premiere at the Lyric Hammersmith in September the same year.  After a successful UK tour it has returned to the Lyric Hammersmith.

This beautifully written play is a complex examination of the paradox of family.  A family makes you what you are yet to discover who you are you have to escape it.  Bovell’s previous plays like Speaking in Tongues (1996), Holy Day (2001) and When the Rain Stops Falling (2008) have all dealt with the question of freedom and determination.  Things is the most straightforward of the four and does not jump back and forth in time in order to create a determinist structure.  Instead, after the flash-forward that begins the play, the action unrolls in chronological order.  Fragmentation in this play consists of the points of view of the the four children of Bob and Fran Price and why they all need and must escape their parents.

The youngest child, Rosie (Kirsty Oswald), has travelled the farthest away to “find” herself.  She has taken a gap year trip to Europe and finds her first true love only to have her heart broken.  Then all she wants is to quit travelling and go home to her family and Hallett Cove, the dull suburb of Adelaide she had thought was so stifling.  There her whole family greet her with open arms arms, her mother Fran (Cate Hamer) immediately intuiting what has happened.

Bovell’s play does not depict the notion “You Can’t Go Home Again” as per the title of Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 novel.  Rather, Rosie can go home again.  It’s just that while she is home, her family begins to confront a series of truths that change them forever.  The question Bovell poses is whether these truths destroy or strengthen the family.  As a hint of Bovell’s view, Rosie immediately after her disastrous affair tries to make a list of “things I know to be true” in order to ground herself.  She can think of nothing for the the list.  At the very end of the play, however, after a series of family upheavals, she tries to make the same list again.  This time she has many items to add.

Rather in the schematic mode of a morality play, it is then time for the two brothers to reveal their secrets.  Mark (Matthew Barker), who we first met as happily married IT specialist with children, has had to work up the courage to say first, that his wife is leaving him, and second, that she is leaving because of his issues with his gender identity.  Fran, who was supportive of Rosie, and outraged by Pip, unleashes her greatest fury on Mark to the point of wishing he had never been born.  At least Mark has an ally in Rosie and, surprisingly enough, in Bob (Ewan Stewart), once the shock wears off.

Unlike with Mark, with Ben (Arthur Wilson), the second brother whom Fran babies, something had always seemed not to be quite right.  On the one hand, he is a high-powered, highly paid financial services worker who is so “busy” he hardly has time to chat with his family.  On the other, he brings his shirts home to Fran every week for washing and ironing as if he were still a child.  When Ben reveals his secret, it is Fran who is supportive while Bob, who has come round to the choices of his other children, is incensed.     

       

By the end of the play only two characters’ lives are what we thought they were at the beginning.  One is Rosie, who has recovered from her broken heart while at home.  The other is Bob, a car-worker who retired too early and has taken up tending a rose garden to give himself something to do.  In fact, we hear that the garden with its six symbolic rose bushes has become his world.  He and Fran, a senior nurse, had imagined that by working hard and giving their children all the advantages they never had that their children would be able to lead lives free from the cares they had had.  Unfortunately, their children have grown up with different cares and Bob’s dream of being the paterfamilias of a large extended family who would gather with them on Sundays and holidays has evaporated.

While Bovell’s play is strong in itself, the non-naturalistic staging it receives from co-director Scott Graham of Frantic Assembly makes it even stronger.  Bovell already uses the non-naturalistic device of having characters speak their monologues directly to the audience.  But Graham uses his company’s trademark physical theatre to give the play a dreamlike quality.  Props like a table and chairs slide suddenly into place or are rapidly pushed into the wings for scene changes.  Cast members may move furniture while another is speaking so that we see the speaker from different angles.  Graham choreographs the lifting and carrying of actors around the stage as if they were flying, particularly with Rosie, Pip and Fran when they speak of the ecstasy of love.  When Bob receives a phone call that totally disorients him, Graham arranges for him to lean forward to a 45º angle as if the earth has suddenly tilted.  Geoff Cobham, the set and lighting designer, has lit the stage with 131 clear glass tubular filament bulbs so that the action already looks as if it plays out under an eternity of stars.

The cast gives flawless, multilayered performances.  Fran and Bob, whose decades-long love becomes the impossible model their children seek, are shown to be opposite personalities.  Fran, always ready to presume the worst in any news, is also gifted in guessing her children’s secrets.  She is also prone to fly off the handle in attacking them and frequently says things she regrets later.  Bob, in contrast, is the calm one and, except with Ben, more inclined to forgive than condemn.  Cate Hamer and Ewan Stewart are excellent at showing the couple’s contrasting behaviour.  The anger each shows the children always hides a kernel of sorrow.  And both, even when cheerful, as in the lovely scene when they dance together, betray a fear that no happiness can ever last.

Kirsty Oswald delivers Rosie’s opening monologue beautifully, guiding us gently from innocence and enthusiasm to bitter disappointment.  Through the action she carefully traces Rosie’s recovery in self-worth until, despite all the family’s traumas, she has found the strength to leave home again, this time to study at university. 

Seline Hitzli really convinces us that Pip is right in refuting Fran’s negative interpretations of what Pip plans to do.  Yet, Hitzli’s greatest scene is that of voicing the letter Pip writes to Fran calmly admitting that her mother was right all along and yet firmly resolved to go ahead with her own plan with the full knowledge that it could lead to utter heart-break.

Matthew Barker and Arthur Wilson nicely contrast the sensitive Mark with the brusque Ben.  Barker brings out the complex combination of pain, pathos, irony and determination that make up Mark’s long speech to his parents about the new life he feels he must lead.  Barker’s shows that Mark forces himself despite the humiliation to withstand as long as he can the rage and scorn that Fran heaps upon him.  Wilson, in contrast, makes Ben’s big confession seem more like that of a young child fearing his parents’ blows.

Bovell has tied the action of the play with the passage of the seasons so that the worse moment for the family comes at the end of winter, even if it is an Australian winter, when Bob’s roses are in full bloom.  By linking this cycle of time to the revelations of the four children and to the question of the nature of family, Bovell suggests that change is built in to the passage of time and that a family fundamentally bound by love, as the Price family is, is strong enough to survive any change that time may bring. 

It is rare for a contemporary play to take an optimistic view of life, but Bovell does so while still fully underscoring all the traumas of life that could easily destroy a family less united than the Prices.  In this way Bovell’s play should be seen as a parable rather like a modern version of Shakespeare’s Romances where love and forgiveness can outlast whatever devastating changes time may bring about.  In The Winter’s Tale (1611), Shakespeare’s character Time calls himself “I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror / Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error”.  At the end of Things I Know To Be True, one of the items on Rosie’s list is the nature of Time to “try all”.  Things I Know To Be True is thus a marvellous play not merely about family but about learning how to live in a world marked by constant change.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Matthew Barker as Mark; Arthur Wilson, Seline Hitzli, Kirsty Oswald as Rosie, Matthew Barker and Cate Hamer; Ewen Stewart as Bob.  ©2017 Manuel Harlan.   

For tickets, visit https://lyric.co.uk.