THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE

OSO Arts Centre

★★★★

“A heady mix of dialogue and monologue, the play is perceptive and dramatic but funny too”

Andrew Bovell’s play, “Things I Know To Be True”, is framed by a phone call. It is after midnight when the phone is ringing. Sixty-three-year-old Bob, the father of four grown up children and husband to Fran, hesitates. He fears picking up the receiver. He knows something is wrong. Someone he loves is in trouble. The four children, bathed in shadowy light, speak Bob’s fears aloud.

Cut to Berlin. A winter coat. A travel bag. And a broken heart. Rosie, the youngest child, is overseas but has decided to go back home. She has come to realise that ‘the things I know to be true’ is a very short list indeed. What follows is a heart-rending, heart-warming and intimate story of family life, family resilience, the passage from childhood to adulthood and much more. It is a cyclical narrative but spread over a year, split into four seasons and twelve chapters. Each season focuses on one of the child’s stories. Each season contains a crisis. The seasons merge into one and the focus becomes the whole family. Bovell’s writing is uniquely specific, yet every line is instantly relatable and universal.

Lydia Sax’s deeply moving interpretation latches onto this quality, keeping the play firmly within its small town, Adelaide setting while teasing out the domestic issues at its heart into an all-embracing story of love and loss. Fran and Bob are doting parents. They have invested everything in the next generation. Bob is aware now that his days are numbered as he spends them tending his rose garden having retired too early. Fran has spent a lifetime secretly saving enough money to build up a get-out clause from her marriage should she wish. But the children always have and always will come first. Rosie suffers a broken heart and finds it hardest to grow up. Her elder sister, Pip, is divorcing and abandoning her own two young children to shack up with a lover in Vancouver. Ben could face prison for fraud while Mark faces his own, very different transitions that throw his parents into further turmoil.

A heady mix of dialogue and monologue, the play is perceptive and dramatic but funny too. Tim Whatmough’s realistic set supplies the warmth of the home and garden backdrop while Jonny Danciger’s evocative lighting and sound design fractures this domesticity. The friction between the smooth and the harsh runs through the narrative – a conflict that the cast grapple with superbly. Christopher Kent gives us a brutally honest portrayal of the patriarch, Bob, forever surprising with his ability to swing from anger to compassion and back with authenticity. You can feel the chemistry between him and Michelle Robertson’s Fran. Equally opinionated, Robertson shows the vulnerability beneath the pragmatism with her nuanced portrayal. In more unsure hands Fran could come across as overly selfish and unaccepting. Jordan Stamatiadis, as the youngest sibling Rosie, mixes an ingénue’s wide-eyed desire to grow up with a need for protection. A strong performance that is matched by the others: Claudia Watanabe as duplicitous divorcee Pip who is closer to Daddy than Mummy, Nick Barraclough as Fran’s favourite, Ben and Andrea Boswell, as Mark who transitions to Mia as the seasons change. It is not an easy role, but Boswell pulls it off remarkably well with touching understatement.

“Things I Know To Be True” is steeped in equal amounts of realism and metaphor. The monologues that characters are given draw us away from the everyday into the abstract, and into the true thoughts of each individual. A truly ensemble piece where each is the protagonist. Memories overlap, and true emotions are often only revealed in letters, anecdote or snippets of song. Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ is a haunting leitmotif.

The play marks the first in-house production at the Old Sorting Office to have a full run. Let’s hope that it is not the last. It is a dynamic and assured production that hits home on many levels. We have laughed and we have also recognised parts of ourselves. And we have cried too. This is theatre at its emotive best. Subtly, quietly, naturistically and lyrically poignant. That is one thing I know to be true.