Review: Things I Know to be True brims with bravura performances

Or, at least, that seems to be the leitmotif of his play Things I Know to be True, which opened on Wednesday night at the Earl Arts Centre for a five show run from Three River Theatre company.

A play of particular Australian charms - life around the backyard and wry humour - True follows the Price family, and is an almost continual escalation of interpersonal drama. Things seem only to worsen and relationships become fraught; the idyll of the nuclear family dissipates all within a year.

The heads of the family, the clueless dad, Bob, and domineering mother Fran, are watching eagerly to see how their four children use the opportunities that they themselves never had. But the Australian familial drama hardly differs from elsewhere; all family conflict derives from the push and pull of expectation. And for the Price family, it is often black or white: you meet your parents' hopes, or you dash them.

And, what makes it worse is that parents are the most adept at identifying deficiencies in their children because they're the things they find deficient in themselves. We go back to Larkin: "They fill you with the faults they had".

True's performers revel in that, though. The fault filled characters allow for full-blooded performances of unique complexity, which were undeniably nursed during rehearsals by the show's director, Leigh Oswin. But much of it comes down to the script's strong naturalism which lets its ensemble - particularly Katie Hill and Robbie Bleakley as the two most captivating Price children - give bravura performances of emotional resonance. All of which combines, to use a tired phrase, to make us feel like part of the family.

And that's the play's great strength: that we could easily be in the Prices' places, and we would fight and make up and fight and make up and, in the end, find that we loved one another. That is the one thing we know to be true.

Things I Know to be True is showing until Saturday, November 18, at the Earl Arts Centre, Launceston. Tickets are available at the Theatre North website.