About Time You Saw: Things I Know to be TrueBy Gilly Hopper

Written by Australian writer Andrew Bovell, Things I Know To Be True is a beautiful, touching and funny story about family life. Told through the eyes of four grown siblings struggling to define themselves beyond their parents’ love and expectations Things I Know to be True is a cathartic work of love’s labour’s. A poetic representation of family dynamics, Frantic Assembly’s latest work takes a physical approach to theatre making with choreography that transcends verbal reasoning. Considering that family is an extension of ourselves, Geordie Brookman’s & Scott Graham’s direction and choreography effectively encapsulates a sense of freedom and confinement, expression and underlying support, as the six strong cast fluidly interweave throughout the story.

Credit Manuel Harlan

Things I Know to be True is a thoughtful and telling account of the Price family’s life and lives beyond their nuclear family. Kirsty Oswald and Natalie Casey play sisters Rosie and Pip. These two women, with moral compasses that seem to drive them in opposite directions, prove the dissimilarity that exists between siblings. Furthermore brothers Mark (Matthew Barker) and Ben (Richard Mylan) strengthen the adage that siblings share genes, but rarely personalities. One of the greatest attributes of Things I Know to be True is its transparency, with Bovell gallantly exposing the clashes and comforts of the Price’s family dynamic. Seeing parents Bob and Fran Price, beautifully played by Ewan Stewart and Imogen Stubbs, reiterates the varied personalities, temperaments and view points that can harbor under one roof. Bovell’s writing subtly links and finds common ground amongst characters, while simultaneously presenting boundaries and divisive hurdles for them to over come – both individually and at a macro level. Bowell’s complex and intense study of the mechanics of a family is poetic in what is left unspoken and frank in what is.

Credit Manuel Harlan

This domestic drama unearths both the physical and metaphorical bed of roses in the Price’s backyard and reveals the complicated endeavours a family must endure to make their garden grow.

This new work, currently showing at the Lyric Hammersmith is soon to embark on a UK tour to Oxford, Warwick, Liverpool, Salford and Chichester. More details here: www.lyric.co.uk/whats-on/production/things-i-know-to-be-true/