The Story: The Phone Call to Autumn
This lesson walks the first half of Things I Know to Be True in the order the story unfolds: from the ringing phone that frames the whole play, through Rosie’s heartbreak in Berlin, to the family gathering in Adelaide and Pip’s confession in the autumn garden. Knowing these moments by name — not just the plot in general — is what lets you answer a question on any printed extract with specific, concrete detail.
The Frame: A Ringing Phone at Midnight
The play opens after midnight. A phone is ringing. Bob is afraid to answer it, because he knows that someone he loves is in trouble. His fear is spoken aloud by his four children, asking which of them is hurt. This is Bovell’s frame device — the same call returns at the very end of the play. Crucially, Bob never once considers that the caller might be about his wife, Fran, and neither does the audience. That gap between what Bob fears and what the audience is eventually shown is one of the most important structural choices in the whole play.
The opening phone call frames the entire play and trains the audience to fear for one of the four children. By the end of the play, we learn the call is about Fran, not a child — a reversal built entirely into the play’s structure.
Structure: A Play Told in Seasons
Bovell builds the play around the turning of the seasons — a structure he has said grew from the sense of time passing and the cycle of family life. The play runs across two acts. The version of the story staged by the play’s original producing company moves from a northern-hemisphere winter in London, where Rosie is travelling, into an Adelaide summer, then autumn, winter, spring and a final summer. Four of the seasonal sections open with a monologue from one of the four children — Rosie in Berlin, Pip in the garden, Mark remembering the gum tree, Ben remembering his parents dancing — spoken directly to the audience before the family scenes begin.
It’s tempting to say the play has four seasons, one per child, starting in spring. That isn’t accurate. The producing company’s own synopsis prints six season headings, opening with a northern winter and ending with a second summer, even though it also says elsewhere that each season belongs to one child. The safest approach in an exam answer is to describe the order of events you know — winter in London, summer in Adelaide, autumn, winter, spring, summer — rather than insisting on a single fixed number of sections.
Winter (London): Rosie’s Monologue in Berlin
The play’s first monologue belongs to Rosie. She is alone on a railway platform in Berlin, at the end of a solo trip through Europe that she saved for over a year to afford. Days earlier she met a boy at a club and spent three days with him, imagining bringing him home to marry in her father’s garden. She woke to find him gone, along with her money, her camera and her favourite scarf. To stop herself falling apart, she makes a short list of the things she knows to be true. The list steadies her, and she decides to go home.
Rosie’s list of things she knows to be true begins as a coping mechanism after heartbreak in Berlin and becomes the device that gives the whole play its title and its closing lines.
Summer (Adelaide): The Family Assembles
Back in Adelaide, Fran is getting ready for work when Rosie arrives home completely unannounced. Bob is cross that she didn’t ring ahead so he could collect her from the airport. Fran assumes something must be wrong and immediately telephones the rest of the family. Pip, Ben and Mark all arrive at the house in quick succession. This is the first time the audience sees the family gathered together in the Adelaide house, and Fran’s fussing, prying and constant contact with all four children establishes her role as the family’s matriarch before any of the real secrets surface.
Autumn: Pip’s Announcement and Letter
Autumn belongs to Pip, the eldest child. Pip’s autumn confession to her mother — the moment she says she is leaving her marriage — is staged with the performer sitting on the ground rather than in a chair, a staging choice that signals something is wrong before she says a word (her season-opening monologue is a separate, direct-address speech in the same garden). As she puts it herself, “This garden is the world. Everything that matters happened here.” She tells Fran she is unhappy and leaving her husband, Steve. When Bob asks her directly whether there is another man, she lies and says no.
The rest of autumn builds around Pip’s secret. Fran, talking to Rosie, admits for the first time that she has always wanted to travel and that she has money saved — the first hint of the hidden savings that matter later in the play. Ben arrives showing off a new car that Bob thinks is too flashy, and Rosie announces she plans to move out of home. Then Pip’s letter arrives from Vancouver: she admits to her mother that she left to be with a man who is married with three children, and asks whether Fran ever felt the same pull. The letter is threaded with Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, a track Fran used to play over and over.
As a performer, you might play Pip with a flattened, controlled vocal tone at the start — short, careful sentences — that cracks slightly on the word ‘Steve’, contrasted with a still, low physical position: knees drawn in, eyes fixed on the ground rather than on Fran. As a designer, you could remove the garden furniture entirely for this scene and use a single downstage-left lighting special to isolate Pip on the bare floor, leaving Fran standing over her in shadow — the difference in level between a standing mother and a sitting daughter communicates the power shift in the conversation without either character raising their voice.
Removing furniture and placing Pip on the ground in the autumn scene is a deliberate design choice, not a budget-saving one: a chair is an easy resting place for actors, and taking it away keeps the moment tense and exposed.
Notice how every one of these moments works on two levels at once: the domestic, everyday world of a family in an Adelaide suburb, played in a broadly naturalistic style, and a heightened physical language layered on top of it, including the connecting hands moment that appears later in the play. The written paper includes one compulsory short answer question for all students that links design and context and/or theatrical conventions; you do not need practical design experience to answer it. Being able to describe a concrete staging choice, such as taking away Pip’s chair, gives you precise material to draw on for that kind of question.