The Story: Winter to the Last Summer
Lesson two left the Price family in the middle of Pip's autumn crisis, with her letter from Vancouver still ringing in Fran's ears. This lesson finishes the story: Mark's winter revelation, Ben's spring confession, and the final summer in which Rosie leaves home for good and the play's opening phone call reveals what it was really about all along. Knowing this sequence precisely — who says what to whom, and in which season — matters, because the printed extract in the exam could come from any point in it.
Winter: Mark's Revelation
Mark's monologue opens the winter section: as a boy he climbed the family's gum tree and hid there, watching the household from above, never quite part of the picture. A storm is coming. Fran tells Bob that Mark is coming over with news, and that she suspects he might be gay; Bob is unbothered. Mark arrives soaked through by the rain.
Fran says there is nothing Mark could tell them that would shock them — “There's nothing you could tell us that would shock us” — and Bob adds the one exception: “Unless you told us you had decided to become a woman.” (Fran has already privately told Bob she suspects Mark might be gay.) He has, without meaning to, named the truth. Mark tells his parents he is moving away, ready to begin hormone treatment and live as a woman. Bob and Fran do not know how to respond, and Rosie is hurt that Mark had not confided in her first.
After Mark's revelation, the parents split. Fran stops speaking to him and does not go to the airport. Bob drives him there and, with a single hug, lets Mark know he loves and accepts him.
Staging the Revelation: Performer and Designer Choices
The physical theatre company Frantic Assembly, who co-created this production's movement language, staged Mark's arrival by putting him on top of the garden shed and making it rain on him — a single, naturalistic image linking his tree-top monologue directly to the news he is about to deliver.
As a performer playing Mark, you might choose a raised, exposed physical position — standing rigid on the shed roof, arms wrapped tightly around the body — before the revelation, then a sudden loosening of the shoulders and an outward breath the moment the words are finally spoken, showing the physical cost of holding a secret for years.
As a designer, you could pair this with a lighting state of cold, saturated blue held through the storm, plus a soundscape of rain and distant thunder that drops to near silence the instant Mark speaks, so the audience's attention snaps entirely onto his voice.
Spring: Ben's Secret and the Parents Who Swap Sides
Spring opens with Ben's monologue remembering his parents dancing in the kitchen. Bob and Fran go out dancing for their wedding anniversary; Bob confesses he feels lost, that he finds himself standing in the shed wondering what to do next. His unease connects to real economic history: Bob took redundancy from the car factory in his fifties, and his spring confession shows a man who gave up work early and has never quite replaced it with a new sense of purpose.
They arrive home to find Ben already there, agitated and sweating; Bob and Fran presume he is on drugs. What Ben actually confesses is worse in a different way: “I've stolen some money.” He has been skimming from work to keep up with wealthier colleagues, and the company is investigating. The confrontation between Bob and Ben is staged as a physical power struggle, echoing a famous sports photograph of one fighter standing over another — Bob dominant, Ben accepting the position as deserved.
The reaction to Ben's theft reverses the reaction to Mark's revelation. Fran protects Ben and gives him her hidden savings. Bob refuses him, telling him he has already given what he had.
Fran tries to fix things by giving Ben her own savings — money Bob never knew existed. She then explains why she kept it hidden: she needed to know she could leave if she ever had to. In the same conversation she admits she once fell in love with someone else and came close to leaving, before choosing Bob and the children.
The Last Summer: Rosie Leaves, and How the Play Ends
A year after Rosie came home from Berlin, she announces she is doing a creative writing course in Brisbane, against her parents' wishes. In the staging, Rosie's absent siblings are conjured onto the stage and the family joins hands at the same instant, like a sudden electrical connection — a technique used earlier in the play and reprised here to give Rosie the strength to speak. Rosie drives to Queensland; Bob is left alone in the garden.
That night, the phone rings. Bob comes into the room in his pyjamas: Fran has died. The play does not state how — it happens off stage, and the news arrives only by that call. In grief, not simple anger, Bob goes into the garden and tears the rose bushes out of the ground, left in the torn dirt: a man realising he tended the wrong thing all along.
All four children come home for the funeral and join hands again before they leave for it. Mark returns as Mia. The play closes on Rosie's completed list of the things she knows to be true, and on the plainest possible final words: “Life. It goes on.”
The framing device of the late-night phone call trains the audience to fear for one of Bob's children. It is actually Fran who has died — a possibility Bob, and the audience, never once considers.
Two Common Mistakes to Avoid
Do not write that Ben is a drug addict: his parents only presume drug use when he arrives agitated, but his actual confession is theft. Do not write that Fran dies of an illness, on stage, or right at the play's opening — she dies off stage, suddenly, in the final summer, after Rosie has already left for Brisbane, and the exact cause is never given.
Also check which parent does what after each secret: Fran turns away from Mark and misses the airport goodbye, while Bob drives him there and accepts him with a hug; on Ben it reverses completely, with Fran protecting and paying, and Bob refusing to help. Naming this reversal accurately, and to the right parent, is what turns a general comment into a precise, well-evidenced answer.