Review: Things I Know To Be True at the People's Theatre
If you think family life is fraught, you should share an evening with the Price family.
Unless you’re really unfortunate, your domestic concerns will pale by comparison.
Each one of them – dad, mum and four grown up kids - harbours enough inner anguish to sustain a dedicated treatment yet in Andrew Bovell’s play they all share a stage, or in this case a circular performance area.
“This play is the world,” suggests director Sara Jo Harrison and, indeed, it’s representative of its stresses and strains (as well as being round). But just as the TV news highlights the interestingly bad, there’s little drama to be had in life as routinely pleasant.
This evening spent with the Prices begins with Rosie, the youngest and cheeriest sibling, and her assertion that her list of things she knows to be true is very short.
The unreliability of lovers found on gap year jaunts is something she’s soon able to add to her list. Forced to curtail her tour of Europe (Bovell set his play in his native Australia but the accents indicate we’re in the North East), Rosie, played by Maya Torres, heads home.
Parents Bob and Fran (Steve Robertson and Moira Valentine) do the parental thing, questioning and consoling… but it won’t be for the last time.
When married daughter Pip (Alison Carr) announces she’s leaving her husband and kids, Fran’s tone becomes more accusatory. When Mark (Jay Hindmarsh) reveals his desire to become Mia, Bob, after first putting his foot in it big time, also goes on the attack.
The last straw is the panicked confession by other son Ben (Sam Burrell) that his sudden wealth has been ill-gotten… or it would be the last straw if the rifts in Bob and Fran’s marriage aren’t suddenly laid bare.
Bob reveals that the rose garden, his bolthole since being made redundant from the car factory, has lost its allure but Fran’s confession, when it comes, is more devastating.
Things I Know To Be True premiered in Australia and later in London in 2016.
The People’s amateurs perform it beautifully ‘in the round’, rising to the moments of high tension and catching the flashes of tenderness and humour, while the passing seasons are represented by the scattering of leaves or petals from a central upended box.
But don’t expect too much comic relief.
I was tickled by the sight of a character (Mark, now Mia) getting watered plant-style on stage – never seen that before - but the same character’s determined repudiation of the past and all family interactions as they face an uncertain future is devastating.
The fact that Pip falls for a fan of Leonard Cohen, that great minstrel of misery, says it all really.
Things I Know To Be True runs at the People’s Theatre until Saturday (September 14). For tickets and details of the new season, go to the venue website.
 | A guest post by
|