It begins with a phone call in the middle of the night – an unsettling time to hear the telephone ring as it so often means bad news. The play then unfolds over a year in the life of a working-class Australian family from suburban Adelaide, circling back to that fateful moment.

Tony Martin, Miranda Daughtry and Helen Thomson. Photograph © Heidrun Löhr

Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know To Be True is a deeply moving piece of theatre about family, parenting, identity and love. It premiered in 2016 in a co-production between State Theatre Company of South Australia and Frantic Assembly, the renowned physical theatre company from the UK. Now, Neil Armfield has returned to Belvoir to direct a new production. The pairing of Armfield and Bovell is a match made in heaven, with family a central theme in the work of both, and the exquisitely staged production reaches into your heart from its opening moments and keeps you gripped until its shattering end.

Bovell has structured the play around the four seasons, with each of the four siblings of Bob and Fran Price (Tony Martin and Helen Thomson), facing a crisis that brings...