Essay Question – based on ‘Things I know To Be True’
On Thursday the 28th of September I went to go see Frantic Assembly’s version of ‘Things I Know To Be True’, by Andrew Bovell, at The Oxford Playhouse. This play is about a family who go through a range of problems and how each character deals with them. They are lead through their decisions by their parents, Fran & Bob. The scene I have chosen to talk about is the final scene and the character I have chosen is Bob, played by John McArdle.
At the beginning of this scene, a phone ringing is heard and Bob comes on, bare foot and in his pyjamas. This was effective because this is the same way that the play begins, as if the whole play was leading the audience up to this point. When we are told that someone has died, at first, we are unsure whether it is Rosie or Fran. Rosie then comes on stage and starts describing the accident, where we are then told that it was indeed Fran who had died. Bob then begins to break down, McArdle portrays this emotion well when he breaks out into an agonising and guttural scream. This really made the audience begin to empathise with him because you could hear the passion towards his lost wife.
McArdle then begins to illustrate the pain and anger Bob would be feeling by ripping out the rose bushes Fran had asked for him to take up, but he denied because they grew as the family grew, which made the audience think that those rose bushes represented the family to Bob. So when he began to rip them out of the ground, it was as if the family was falling apart without Fran. While ripping out the roses from the flower beds, McArdle shows Bob’s pure rage by the way his body and facial expressions becomes animalistic in the way he moves and looks. During this part of the scene, McArdle showed the raw emotion in his face, by...
