Context: Bovell, Frantic Assembly and Suburban Australia

Two Playmakers, One Family Story

Things I Know to Be True did not begin as a finished script. It began as a partnership between an Australian playwright and a British physical theatre company, built through two Research and Development weeks, held two years apart, before a single word reached the page. Understanding how that partnership worked — and the suburban Adelaide world it grew from — gives you the context every set-play question expects you to bring to an extract.

Andrew Bovell: The Writer

Andrew Bovell is an Australian playwright and screenwriter who lives in Willunga, South Australia. His stage work includes The Secret River, When the Rain Stops Falling, Speaking in Tongues, Holy Day and After Dinner; his screen work includes Strictly Ballroom, Head On, Lantana, Blessed, Edge of Darkness and A Most Wanted Man. He gave the BAFTA/BFI International Screenwriting Lecture in 2015.

Geordie Brookman, newly appointed as Artistic Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, commissioned Bovell to write a new play. Bovell asked for his usual writing process to be challenged, so Brookman approached Scott Graham of Frantic Assembly, and the two companies agreed a co-production, with further partners including Warwick Arts Centre, Chichester Festival Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith.

Devising Without a Script

The play grew out of two Research and Development (R&D) weeks, held two years apart in June 2014 and May 2015. Six actors, the designer and the two directors worked in the room together, starting from a book of Gregory Crewdson photographs — and no script at all.

Graham’s instruction to Bovell was that he should not necessarily write for the movement, and that Graham would respond to whatever Bovell wrote. Bovell nonetheless wrote four children’s monologues, one for each of the Price children, because he recognised that a more physical theatre realisation would suit them. The play’s working title was The Price of Love; Brookman suggested the title it was eventually given.

One World, Two Productions

When the production travelled to Britain, it was remade rather than transferred: the same directors and the same design language, but an entirely new British cast, rehearsed from scratch. The setting stayed Australian and not a word of the text was changed. The British actors were not asked to adopt Australian accents, because the creative team judged that the specific thing the play captures is social class, not geography.

The design team stayed consistent across both productions: set and lighting by Geoff Cobham, a large painted tree by Thom Buchanan, and existing recordings by the composer Nils Frahm used as underscore rather than a newly commissioned score. Every choice fed a single design concept: an ordinary Adelaide family home, lit and scored so that its quietest moments could suddenly take flight.

Setting: The Price Family’s Garden at Hallett Cove

The play is anchored in the back garden and house of the Price family at 25 Windarie Avenue, Hallett Cove, a southern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, though the action also travels away from it — to a railway platform in Berlin for Rosie's opening monologue, to Vancouver for Pip's letter, and to the airport when Mark leaves. The garden holds a shed, a wading pool, rose bushes, a lemon tree, a garden hose, a wheelbarrow and a large gum tree — ordinary, unglamorous, deeply lived-in objects that anchor a naturalistic family world.

Ageing Parents and the Australian Dream

Bovell has said he sometimes feels like Bob, left in the garden wondering where everybody has gone, and sometimes like Fran, asking what comes next. His own mother died shortly before he wrote the play, and his youngest child was leaving home at the same time — he says he was no longer anybody’s child. That double sense of loss shapes the play’s seasonal structure: as one child grows towards the things she knows to be true, her father grows older and the things he thought were certain start to slip.

Bob and Fran lived what the play frames as the Australian dream: marriage, working-class jobs, saving so their children could have university educations and better lives. Bob took redundancy at fifty-seven when the car factory where he worked closed. Fran remains sceptical of a life deferred and clings to her nursing work because it keeps her feeling useful and alive. Their children’s generation, by contrast, chase immediate happiness rather than delayed reward — a generational contrast built into the family’s every conversation.

Identity and the Family’s Response

Bovell is explicit that the play is not primarily about gender identity itself; a play directly about the experience of transition, he argues, would be best written by someone speaking from that experience. His interest is in how a family responds — whether a child’s transition is felt by the parents as loss or as gain. The company undertook gender-awareness training led by the actress Rebecca Root, and casting was opened widely, though no trans actor was cast in the original 2016 company.

Secrets, the Garden and a Leonard Cohen Song

Every member of the Price family withholds something from the others, so secrecy and truth-telling run through the play as a structural theme. The garden itself works as the family’s emotional anchor: the gum tree was there before the house and will be there after the family has gone, giving every member a place for solitude across the changing seasons. Leonard Cohen’s song Famous Blue Raincoat also threads through the story, a track Fran played over and over, its meaning shifting depending on which character is thinking about it.

Where the Idea Came From

In the first research week, Bovell set up improvisations in which each adult child brought their parents a crisis: one actor was asked to tell their parents they were leaving their husband and children, another to say they were changing gender. Separately, the actor Tilly Cobham-Hervey told the room about being heartbroken and homesick alone in Europe, and how she steadied herself by listing the things she knew to be true. That single idea gave the whole play its frame and its title.