“Las cosas que sé que son verdad is a complex and intense portrait of family mechanics -and matrimony- from the point of view of four children”.

Julián Fuentes Reta

Winners of the Max awards for Best Play and Best Director in 2015 for When the Rain Stops Falling (which also won the Max award for Best Supporting Actress), the playwright Andrew Bovell and the director Julián Fuentes Reta meet once again in a theatre project that places family mechanics at the centre of the plot.

In a suburban home with a small garden, a middle-class family faces the passage of a decisive year. Through the metaphor of the four seasons that summarise the growth and change of four siblings and their relationships with their father and mother, the audience witnesses the development of an organism that mutates, shakes and dies in order to continue perpetually, uncontainably and unstoppably, to breathe and to transform itself.

Bovell's text narrates the efforts of the four siblings to be themselves, separate from the expectations of their parents who have worked hard all their lives to forge a future full of possibilities for their children: one they never had for themselves. The work is a complex and intense portrait of relations within a family, revealing the fissures in relationships that on the surface appear to be stable. Las cosas que sé que son verdad is based on the principles of a theatre committed to the present which explores the emotions that move us.

With great restraint, the piece explores a constant topic of Bovell's imagination: relationships, fissures and the links people have with nature. That which is beyond human knowledge and domains. That which in spite of our illusion of control outlines the passage of our lives.

Julián Fuentes Reta (Zaragoza, 1978) takes on the challenge of directing once again, a text by the Australian playwright. As he himself explains: "Andrew's writing is brave, because it never surrenders to the beauty of love or to the bitterness of destruction. Here, the focus is on the family. And really, what other human structure endures through time? None other than this unit, whether by blood or any other type". And it concludes: "Andrew's texts are a detailed examination of the passage of time and the changes in the beings that evolve in it, of the numerous creations that the rain, the embraces, or the hundreds of sunrises and sunsets that are left on the skin, on gestures, in experience. I've never found another playwright who exposes the violent unreality of our daily lives as he does".

The artists Pilar Gómez and Borja Maestre (also the protagonists of Cuando deje de llover) are once again under the orders of Fuentes Reta, as part of a cast which also consists of Verónica Forqué and Jorge Muriel who is responsible for translating and adapting Bovell's text which was staged for the first time in Australia in 2016. It arrives at the 37th Autumn Festival this November in Madrid. Muriel once again joins Fuentes Reta to look at this family nexus from a many-faceted prism and multiple layers, in a profound desire to comprehend human nature and its capacity for compassion, transformation and survival.

Practical information

• Teatros del Canal, Sala Verde
• 30 November, 20.00
• 1 December, 18.30
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• *The show will continue to be staged as part of the regular programme of Teatros del Canal until 15 December.