Characters: Bob, Fran and the Four Children
Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know to Be True is an ensemble piece built around six members of one family, the Prices. Every printed extract you meet in the exam belongs to one of these six voices, so knowing what each character wants, and how they change across the seasons, lets you place any moment instantly and build a performer or designer response around it.
Bob Price is sixty-three, a retrenched car-factory worker who took redundancy at fifty-seven when the factory closed, believing he would not find another job. He is Fran’s husband and father to Pip, Mark, Ben and Rosie. Bob wants his children close by and his garden ordered — the rest, he feels, he has earned. He is stoic under crisis but quietly lost: “I find myself standing in the shed wondering what to do next.” His arc runs through the whole play: he backs Pip’s decision to leave her marriage, works hard to accept Mark’s transition, refuses to help Ben, cries when Rosie announces Brisbane, and loses Fran before the two of them can properly reconnect. Rosie, tellingly, is named after his roses.
Fran Price is fifty-seven, a senior nurse who is almost always coming from or going to a shift. She is the family’s matriarch: opinionated, fussing, and in touch with all four children at once. Beneath that control sits a private sub-text — she has kept hidden savings so she could leave if she ever needed to, and confesses she once almost left Bob for someone else. She disapproves of Pip, is offended into silence by Mark, nags Rosie, and protects Ben by giving him the money Bob refuses. She dies suddenly, off stage, in the final summer.
The parents swap roles across the two big crises. When Mark reveals he is transitioning, Fran stops speaking to him and stays away from the airport, while Bob drives him there and accepts him with a hug. When Ben confesses to theft, it flips: Fran protects him and hands over her savings, while Bob refuses to help. Naming this reversal is exactly the kind of specific, structural observation that separates a strong answer from a generic one.
Pip is the eldest child at thirty-four, working for the Education Department and married to Steve, with children including a daughter, Katie. She wants to escape becoming her mother and to feel loved, and she is Bob’s favourite. In the autumn scenes she tells her parents she is leaving Steve and has taken a job in Vancouver; when Bob asks directly whether there is another man, she lies. The truth — that she has gone to be with a married man — only surfaces in a letter she posts home. A key memory anchors her: aged twelve she once saw Fran banging her head against the garden’s gum tree and howling, and never asked why. By the time she is a woman herself, she says she finally understands.
Mark is the second child, working in IT and close to Rosie, who he effectively mothered as a baby. In the winter section he arrives home soaked from a storm to tell his parents he does not align with the sex and gender he was assigned at birth, and that he is ready to live as a woman. Fran had guessed, wrongly, that he might be gay; Bob names the one thing he thinks would shock them — a decision to become a woman — moments before Mark says exactly that. Mark leaves the family for treatment and returns at the very end of the play as Mia. Both names belong to the same character, in that order.
Ben is the third child and the younger son, not yet thirty, working in financial services. He buys a flashy new car his parents think he cannot afford, then arrives home agitated; his parents assume drugs, but what he actually confesses is that he has been stealing from work to keep pace with wealthier colleagues, and the company is investigating. Bob is furious and refuses to help him face the consequences. Fran does the opposite: she gives him her hidden savings — the same money that later reveals her near-affair to Bob.
Rosie is the youngest, a self-described happy accident who wants life to start. After the opening phone-call frame, the play’s first season section finds Rosie alone on a Berlin railway platform, her solo European trip having ended in heartbreak and theft; to hold herself together she starts a list of the things she knows to be true. She comes home, is fussed over, announces she is moving out, and — a year later — announces a creative writing course in Brisbane against her parents’ wishes. She drives away, and it is while she is gone that Fran dies. Rosie returns for the funeral and closes the play with her completed list.
The play opens and closes with the same late-night phone call. Bob is afraid because he believes someone he loves is in trouble — and every crisis in the play has trained the audience to assume it must be one of the four children. It is Fran who has died. Neither Bob nor his children ever consider that the call could be about her, which is exactly what makes the final revelation land so hard.
As a performer, Bob’s vocal choices in this moment matter more than his words. A slow, cracked delivery, dropping in volume rather than rising, would suggest a man working hard to master his own confusion before it becomes rejection. Physically, a performer might hold Bob’s blocking stiff and formal until the final hug, then let the whole body soften into it — the shift in posture becomes the moment of acceptance, communicated through the body rather than through dialogue.
As a designer, reducing the physical distance between Bob and Mark using proxemics — from the width of the stage down to almost nothing by the final beat — would visually track the reconciliation. A costume designer might dress Mark in a single item, a scarf or a coat, that reappears later on Mia, giving the audience a visual thread between the two names for the same person.
It is tempting to call Ben a drug addict because his parents assume it themselves — but what he actually confesses to is theft from his workplace, not drug use. It is equally tempting to state Rosie’s exact age with confidence; the sources disagree, so keep her described simply as the youngest child rather than committing to a number.
Birth order is also worth fixing precisely: Pip (34) is the eldest, Mark is second, Ben is third and in his late twenties, and Rosie is the youngest. Calling Ben the youngest child, rather than the younger son, is a common slip — Rosie is younger than him.
Every one of these characters is built from a working or lower-middle-class Australian world: a factory redundancy, a nursing shift, a corporate ambition that outstrips a family’s means. When you answer the compulsory question linking design and context, remember that the creative team behind the original production judged the play’s specific truth to be about social class, not geography — which is why a costume or set choice rooted in class (worn gardening clothes against a corporate suit, for instance) will usually say more about this family than one rooted only in period or place.
The play is written for an ensemble, with a monologue for each of the four children opening the seasons, but Rosie’s and Bob’s story sits at its centre — she is the play’s entry point and its closing voice. There is no single protagonist: a strong answer can trace that central pairing while still showing how the focus shifts across the family, rather than treating any one character as the sole subject. Practise moving fluently between characters — naming who wants what, who lies to whom, and who changes sides — and you will always have material for a performer or designer question, whichever family member the extract puts in front of you.