Themes: Family, Truth, Identity and Love
Every scene in Things I Know to Be True is built around an idea, not just an event. Bovell has suggested the play is not really about its plot points — the affair, the transition, the theft — but about what a family does when love collides with change. The play opens and closes on the same image: a ringing telephone in the middle of the night. This framing device trains the audience, exactly as it trains Bob, to fear for one of the four children — and the fact that the fear turns out to be misplaced drives almost every theme below.
Family: The Thing You Escape and the Thing You Return To
Bovell wrote the play in his fifties, shortly after his mother died and while his own youngest child was leaving home. He has described feeling, at different points, like both Bob (left in the garden wondering where everyone has gone) and Fran (asking what happens next). That double identification produces a lot of subtext in the family scenes: characters rarely say directly that they are frightened of getting older or of being left behind — it comes out sideways, in nagging, in fussing, in Bob insisting everyone should live close by.
Rosie's arc carries this theme from one end of the play to the other. Each of the four children delivers a monologue that opens a season, spoken directly to the audience before the family scenes begin — Rosie in Berlin, Pip in the garden, Mark in the gum tree, Ben remembering his parents dancing — and Rosie's frames the whole play (note that accounts of how many seasonal sections the play has differ, so do not learn a fixed number): heartbroken and robbed in Berlin, she comforts herself by making a list of the things she knows to be true, then decides to go home. By the final summer she has grown enough to leave again — this time on her own terms, driving to Queensland for a creative writing course against her parents' wishes. The family she runs to at the start is the same family she has to leave a second time in order to become herself.
The physical work turns the family theme into a single stage picture: the family on stage move in from different angles and join hands at exactly the same instant, like a sudden electrical connection. It is used twice: first to give Rosie the strength to announce she is leaving for Brisbane, with the full on-stage family, including her absent siblings conjured around her, joining hands; and then again before the four children leave for Fran's funeral. However far apart this family scatters, the staging insists they stay connected.
Secrets and Truth-Telling
Every member of this family withholds something, and the play repeatedly contrasts what a character says with what a character does. Pip lies to her father's face when he asks directly whether there is another man in Vancouver — she tells the truth only in a letter posted from Canada, threaded with the Leonard Cohen song her mother used to play obsessively. Ben hides a work scandal behind an expensive new car; when he finally confesses, what he admits to is skimming money from work — his parents, seeing him agitated and sweating, had presumed he was on drugs (accounts of the play differ on that point, so keep to what he actually confesses).
Fran's secret is the most quietly devastating: a bank account Bob never knew existed, kept because she had to know she could go if she ever needed to, alongside a confession that she once fell in love with someone else and almost left. Bovell builds dramatic irony into the play's biggest secret of all: Fran says there is nothing Mark could tell them that would shock them — she suspects he might be gay — and Bob then names the one exception: “Unless you told us you had decided to become a woman.” He has, without realising it, just described exactly what is about to happen.
As a performer, this moment demands precise ensemble timing rather than individual character work: each actor must cross from a different angle and land the contact at exactly the same instant, so the join reads as a single, sudden event rather than a series of separate touches. An actor playing Rosie in the first use of the moment needs stillness immediately beforehand — a held breath, a lowered gaze — so the instant of contact visibly gives her the courage to speak her next line.
As a designer, you might isolate the moment with a lighting special — a tight, warm wash that snaps on the instant the hands connect, distinct from a cooler general state around it, pulling the audience's eye straight to the join. A single sustained low tone underscoring the seconds before contact, cut dead the instant the hands meet, would let the silence afterwards carry the emotional weight instead of music doing the work.
Identity: The Family's Response, Not the Issue Itself
Bovell has been explicit that the play is not really about gender: such a play, he has said, would be better written by someone who could speak directly from that experience. His interest is in the family's response — whether a child's transition registers to the parents as a loss or as a gain, and whether grief is involved at all. Mark's own monologue sets up a motif of watching from outside: as a boy he climbed the gum tree and hid, watching his family from above, feeling that he was not really part of the picture. That childhood image of separation returns, transformed, in his adult decision to leave the family in order to become who he is.
The family's reactions to Mark's revelation and to Ben's confession mirror each other, but with the parents swapped. That symmetry is one of the most useful things to notice for an exam answer, because it shows Bovell building meaning through structure, not just through dialogue.
The play deliberately reverses which parent stands by which child. Fran stops speaking to Mark and does not travel to the airport to say goodbye; it is Bob who drives him there and accepts him with a single hug. On Ben, the parents swap roles: Fran protects him and hands over her secret savings, while Bob refuses to help and tells him to face the consequences. Neither parent is simply the accepting one or the harsh one — each is both, depending on which child and which crisis.
Money, Work and a Class Rather Than a Nationality
Bob and Fran built their lives on what they believed was a fair deal: marriage, steady working-class jobs, saving, and a university education for their children so the children's lives would be easier than their own. Bob took redundancy at fifty-seven when the car factory where he worked closed, and has never quite recovered his sense of purpose. Fran, a senior nurse, is sceptical of deferred living and clings to work partly because it keeps her independent. The play sets this generation in juxtaposition against their children's generation, who consume now and chase immediate happiness rather than saving for a future that might not arrive — Ben's theft to keep up with wealthier colleagues is the sharpest example.
This is also the play's clearest link between design and context. When the production was remade for a British cast, the creative team kept the Adelaide setting and did not ask the actors to use Australian accents, because they judged the specific thing the play captures is social class, not geography. For a question linking design and context, this is a genuinely useful point: a costume or set choice that signals an ordinary suburban family under financial pressure works whether the production is set in Adelaide or anywhere else, because the class position is the constant, not the postcode.
The Garden: Roses Against the Gum Tree
The garden holds the play's central image: Bob's rose bushes set against Fran's native gum tree. The roses are something Bob has tried to cultivate and control, and the play increasingly reads them as standing for his children — something he wanted to shape rather than let grow wild. Fran's dismissal of the roses as “They're just an excuse for not living.” hints early at a truth that only becomes clear by the end: Bob's real crisis was never really about flowers. That early irritation works as foreshadowing for the moment after Fran's death when Bob tears the roses out of the ground in grief.
The gum tree works oppositely: it was there before the house was built and will still be there after the family has gone, so it comes to represent the one constant thing while everything else — marriages, genders, jobs, addresses — changes around it. Reading the roses and the tree together gives you a ready-made answer for any question about how the play's design communicates its themes without a word of dialogue.
A common mistake is treating Mark and Mia's story as the play's statement about gender itself. Bovell has said directly that this was not his intention — the play is about how a family responds to change within itself, and the same structural pattern, a child reveals something and the parents react unevenly, one coming round and one pulling away, also governs Pip's departure and Ben's theft. A strong answer treats identity as one instance of the play's wider theme: what a family does when a child becomes someone the parents did not expect.
It also helps to remember that critical opinion on this scene has not stood still: some more recent productions have been read as dated in how the parents initially respond. You do not need to resolve that debate to write a strong answer — you only need to show that you understand the family's uneven reaction is the dramatic point, not an incidental detail.