Form and Methods: Monologue, Movement and Season
Two Acts, a Ringing Phone, and a Wheel of Seasons
Andrew Bovell built Things I Know to Be True in two acts, with one interval, and threaded the whole thing together with a framing device: it is after midnight, a phone is ringing, and Bob is afraid to answer because he knows someone he loves is in trouble. His fear is spoken aloud by his four children. The same call returns right at the end of the play — but by then the audience has learned exactly who it is about.
The Season Structure
Bovell has said the idea of structuring the play around a series of seasons grew out of a sense of time passing and the cycle of life. The producing company’s own printed synopsis for the world premiere gives six section headings in this order: the unheaded opening phone call, Winter (London) for Rosie, Summer (Adelaide) as the family gathers, Autumn for Pip, Winter for Mark, Spring for Ben, and a final Summer in which Rosie leaves and Fran dies. Read this way, the Adelaide year runs summer through to summer, and the opening “Winter” is the northern winter Rosie is escaping when she flies home into an Adelaide summer.
Sources do not fully agree on how many seasonal sections there are — the same guide elsewhere describes one season per child, which would suggest four rather than six. Stay open about this in an exam answer rather than picking a number: what matters is that each child’s central crisis gets its own season, opened by that character’s own monologue.
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. Naming the right moment for the right character should be automatic in an exam answer.
Why Monologue at All?
Bovell has explained that he wrote the four monologues because of the collaboration with the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly: he realised monologues would suit a more physical, abstract, movement-based staging better than a scene of naturalistic dialogue. A monologue clears the stage picture down to one body, giving the director permission to lift, suspend or isolate that body in space — exactly what happened in rehearsal for Rosie’s monologue.
In rehearsal, the physical lifts for Rosie’s Berlin monologue were built completely separately from the text, and the performer was not told in advance that the two would be combined. Director Scott Graham wanted Rosie to feel weightless, floating up on the love of Emmanuel and of her family — even though that love has just betrayed her. Keeping movement and text apart in rehearsal stopped the actor compromising either one for the other.
The performers doing the lifting stay in character throughout, not functional stagehands, and even characters who have already “left” the story — in Canada or Sydney by that point in the timeline — remain present on stage and take part in each other’s lifts. The choice makes a thematic point without a word of dialogue: however far this family scatters, they stay physically connected.
The Building Blocks: How Frantic Assembly Made the Movement
Bovell was explicitly told not to write for the movement. Scott Graham’s method works the other way round: the physical language responds to a finished, naturalistic script rather than the script being written to fit choreography. Graham calls the production’s most heightened physical moments lift off, and his aim was to make those moments feel as ordinary and inevitable as everything else on stage.
Two named techniques recur across the production. The first is the Presumption of Weight: performers assume they are too heavy and try to make themselves light, when the opposite works better. The person being lifted gives their weight downward, keeping a straight back and engaged stomach muscles, while the lifters use their frame to move the weight sideways into position rather than pressing it upward. Graham’s own comparison: two people lifting a table is easier than two people lifting a mattress of the same size.
The second is connecting hands: the whole family moves in from different angles and joins hands at exactly the same moment. It is used twice: first to give Rosie the strength to announce she is leaving for Brisbane, with her absent siblings conjured onto the stage around her, and then again before the family leaves for Fran’s funeral. The sequence proved so effective it became a printed stage direction in the published text.
The Presumption of Weight is the production’s central lifting technique: the lifted performer pushes their weight downward into the point of contact instead of going light, and the lifters move that weight sideways using their frame, not their muscles.
Stillness, Furniture and the Discipline of Restraint
The physical language is not only about lifting bodies into the air. Co-directors Geordie Brookman and Scott Graham deliberately worked to make the furniture on stage redundant, and found they had lost most of it well before the interval without the world feeling any less domestic. Their reasoning: a chair is theatrically dead and an energy-sapper. This is why 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 (her season-opening monologue is a separate, direct-address speech in the same garden): the choice itself signals, before a word is spoken, that something has gone wrong.
Stillness became a technique in its own right rather than an absence of one. Once the cast had persevered with sustained stillness on stage, the slightest gesture or flinch became dynamic by contrast. Brookman’s own phrase for the resulting tension between characters was “the tense steel wire”. Movement in this production had to be earned: denying an obvious movement for as long as possible plants the possibility of it in the audience’s mind, so the eventual flinch or lift lands with far more force.
A common error is to assume the play moves neatly through spring, summer, autumn and winter, one season per child. The producing company’s own printed synopsis for the world premiere actually opens on a northern-hemisphere winter in London for Rosie, moves to an Adelaide summer as the family gathers, then runs autumn (Pip), winter (Mark), spring (Ben) and a final summer, in which Rosie leaves and Fran dies. That printed synopsis gives six sections across two hemispheres’ worth of winters — though the same guide elsewhere describes one season per child, which would suggest four. Sources genuinely disagree on the count, so name the printed order rather than committing to a number. An answer that just says “the four seasons” without naming the actual order is far less precise than one that tracks the printed sequence, so practise naming the order.
A Technical Choice with a Structural Purpose
Form and design meet directly in the framing device. When the midnight phone call knocks Bob off balance, the production used a harness hidden inside his pyjama top, connected by a carabiner and rope, to let the performer fall slowly forward at roughly a forty-five degree angle and return upright — as if the earth itself had tilted. Naming a specific mechanism like this, tied to a specific structural moment such as the opening and closing phone call, is exactly the kind of concrete choice that separates a strong designer answer from a vague one.