Books
Andrew Bovell

Things I Know to be True (NHB Modern Plays)

A complex and intense portrait of the mechanics of a family — and a marriage — through the eyes of four siblings struggling to define themselves beyond their parents' love and expectations.
Bob and Fran have worked hard to give their four children the opportunities they never had. Now, with the kids ready to make lives of their own, it's time to sit back and smell the roses. But the change of the seasons reveals some shattering truths, leaving us asking whether it's possible to love too much.
Andrew Bovell's beautifully touching, funny and bold play Things I Know To Be True was premiered in Adelaide, Australia, as a co-production between Frantic Assembly and the State Theatre Company of South Australia. It received its British premiere in 2016, co-produced with Warwick Arts Centre in association with Chichester Festival Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith.
'Bovell's hypnotic, poetic use of language and his unusual plotting structure… are piercingly beautiful' — Arts Hub Australia
72 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2016
Publication year
2016
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
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Impressions

  • gabbireeseshared an impression5 years ago
    👍Worth reading

Quotes

  • ameliastanimeroshas quoted7 years ago
    you. I know that things can’t remain the same no matter how much you want them to. I know that people aren’t perfect. Even the people you love. Especially the people you love. And I know that love is not enough to save them.
    I know what grief tastes like. It’s bitter. I know what it sounds like. It’s loud. And I know that on the day my mother died my childhood finally ended.
    I know that summer turns to autumn and that autumn becomes winter and that winter turns to spring and spring back to summer. And it goes on.
    Life.
    It goes on.
  • ameliastanimeroshas quoted7 years ago
    ROSIE. I hang up. I get out of the car. I can hardly breathe. I’m standing on the side of the highway. I don’t know whether to turn back or to keep going. I’m somewhere between who I was and who I’m going to be. I want my dad. I want my sisters and brother. I want my mum. I want my mum. But I can’t think of her, of them, not now, because if I do my chest will explode. I feel like I’m literally going to fall to pieces. That my arms are going to drop off and then my legs and my head. And so to stop myself coming apart I make a list of all the things I know to be true.
    I know that having your heart broken by a boy from Spain won’t be the worst thing that happens to
  • ameliastanimeroshas quoted7 years ago
    wondered if she had been too soft with him and let him get away with things that she wouldn’t have stood for from the others.
    She thought about love and how sometimes you could give too much and sometimes you couldn’t give enough and that knowing the right place in-between wasn’t easy. And she thought about Bob. He’ll still be asleep. She looked forward to crawling into bed beside him. She loved the warmth of him in the morning.
    She was thinking of all this when her eyes closed, just for a moment. She veered off the inside lane and hit the concrete divider before flipping the car. She was crushed on impact. She was dead on arrival at the hospital where she worked.

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