Staging and Design: The Garden, the Bulbs and the Lifts
Designing the Bubble: Set and Lighting
The world of Things I Know to Be True is centred on the back garden and house of the Price family, at 25 Windarie Avenue in Hallett Cove, a suburb of Adelaide — though the play also reaches beyond it, to Rosie alone on a railway platform in Berlin and to Pip's day in Vancouver. A shed, a wading pool, rose bushes, a lemon tree and a garden hose sit around one landmark that outlasts every crisis: a huge gum tree. As a designer, you are not decorating a house — you are building the one place every character keeps returning to, however far they travel.
Two Halves of One Stage
Set and lighting designer Geoff Cobham split the stage in two. Downstage was a slippery black floor built for sliding furniture and for Frantic Assembly’s physical sequences. Upstage was the garden itself, with a pool liner built into the floor so real water could create sprinklers, a wading pool and rain. Above both halves stood a large monochromatic tree, painted by Thom Buchanan onto a black scrim in mirror image, lit differently as the seasons in the play turned from summer through to summer again.
Hanging above the whole stage was a ceiling of roughly a hundred and thirty bulbs. Cobham described what they meant: “These represent the bubble that Bob the father lives in.” Bob has never travelled, and the bulbs box him into a small, contained, romantic version of home.
Lighting Leads the Design
Cobham’s guiding aim was to make the performer the brightest thing on stage: if the emotional story could be told through light, the built scenery could be stripped back. His touchstone was the photographer Gregory Crewdson, whose suburban images use dominant, hyperreal key lighting. The production is reported to have used roughly ten times the lighting cues of a standard show. Every lighting state had to earn its place: a general lighting wash for an ordinary afternoon in the garden, then a slow cross-fade as a season, and a mood, shifts underneath it.
In the autumn scene, Pip delivers her news sitting on the ground rather than in a chair. This was a deliberate design decision: the directors found a chair theatrically dead, an energy sapper that shrinks the world around it, so removing it entirely is itself a statement that something in the family is wrong.
As a performer, sitting low denies Pip the status a chair would give her, so her voice must carry the argument instead of her posture — a controlled, level delivery that refuses to rise in pitch even as Fran reacts. As a designer, isolate her with a tight lighting state: a narrow warm wash holding her alone against the tree upstage, leaving the rest of the garden in a dimmer general wash, so the audience reads instantly that this conversation is happening apart from the rest of the family, even though it is set in the same garden as everything else.
The Frantic Assembly Building Blocks
Frantic Assembly’s physical language was built to grow out of Bovell’s finished script, not the other way round. The company’s core lifting principle is the Presumption of Weight: the person being lifted keeps a straight back, engages their stomach, and pushes their weight down into the lifters rather than trying to float. The lifters then move that weight laterally, using their frame rather than their arm muscles. Director Scott Graham compared the effect to a barn-raising, not to a romantic film lift.
For Rosie’s opening monologue in Berlin, groups of performers build a sequence of hugs — real, varied embraces, not a single static pose — to conjure the family she is imagining and longing for from far away. Crucially, the performers doing the lifting stay in character throughout, functioning as an ensemble rather than as invisible stagehands, and even characters who have left the story — in Canada, or in Sydney — remain on stage to lift in other people’s scenes, showing that distance never truly breaks the family’s connection.
One moment of physical staging became a printed stage direction in the published play: the family on stage move in from different angles and join hands at exactly the same instant, like a sudden electrical connection. It happens twice: first, the full on-stage family, including the absent siblings conjured around Rosie, join hands to give her the strength to announce she is leaving for Brisbane; and then again, the four children join hands before they leave for Fran’s funeral.
Making the Furniture Disappear
Tables and chairs slide on and off through the whole production and are never fixed to one spot; each shift works like a change of camera angle, letting the audience circle the same table from a new position. The directors deliberately worked to make furniture redundant, and found they had lost most of it before the interval without the world feeling any less like a family home. Every piece of blocking on that sliding floor has to be rehearsed as precisely as choreography.
A common mistake is to treat a still, quiet moment as a moment with no design decision in it. The cast used Gregory Crewdson’s photographs to rehearse genuine stillness on stage, and once they had achieved it, the slightest gesture or flinch became dramatically enormous by contrast. A held silence between two performers standing apart is not a gap in the design — it is the design, and it depends entirely on careful proxemics to make that distance readable as tension rather than as accident.
Specific Staged Images and Their Effect
When the late-night phone call comes, Bob is knocked off balance by it: a harness hidden inside his pyjama top, attached to a hidden rope, lets him tilt slowly forward to about forty-five degrees and back upright, as if the ground itself had shifted under him. It is a small technical effect built entirely to serve one emotional idea — his whole world tipping.
Mark’s confession is staged with him soaked through, standing on the garden shed as stage rain falls on him, linking his earlier tree-top monologue directly to the moment he is about to change his family’s understanding of him. Later, the confrontation between Bob and Ben is staged on the model of a famous boxing photograph, with Bob standing dominant over a prone Ben — a physical image of judgement that needs no dialogue at all.
Pip’s letter home from Vancouver is staged as an ordinary day — buses, a coffee queue, a lift — with furniture gliding into place only in the final seconds of each fragment, ending on an empty chair Pip hopes her lover will one day fill. Instead, it is Fran who takes that chair, closing the physical distance between mother and daughter to the width of a table. Later still, when Bob tears out the rose bushes after Fran’s death, the roses are revealed as fake props, thrown loosely across the stage as the lighting opens up to expose the whole garden at once.
Costume and Sound Choices
Costume stayed close to everyday clothes with small seasonal additions rather than heavy period dressing: Bob moves from gardening clothes into a suit, Fran mostly wears her nurse’s uniform and changes into a dress for one night of dancing, and Rosie arrives home in a duffel coat before settling into summer dresses. The production used existing recordings by the composer Nils Frahm rather than a commissioned score, chosen for their minimalism, because anything more overwhelming risked overpowering the story rather than supporting it.
Every design choice in this production is answerable to context. The garden, the redundancy that put Bob out of work, and the family’s stretch to send their children to university all root the play in a specific Australian working-class world. The creative team judged that this social class, not the Australian setting itself, was the essential thing to preserve — which is why nothing was reset when the production was remade for a British cast.