Theatre review: Black Swan State Theatre Company presents Andrew Bovell’s play Speaking In Tongues

Expectations were understandably high ahead of Black Swan State Theatre Company’s latest season presenting Cottesloe-raised, UWA graduate playwright Andrew Bovell’s play Speaking In Tongues. Not only has Bovell’s 30-year-old script become an Australian classic, with him in turn adapting it for the screen as 2001 film Lantana, but Black Swan audiences had already been blown away by the theatre company’s 2023 season of his work Things I Know To Be True. That production won all five awards it was nominated for at the Performing Arts WA Awards in 2024, including best mainstage theatre production and outstanding lead performances for Caroline Brazier and Humphrey Bower. The latter, acclaimed theatre artist Bower, now steps into the role of director for Speaking In Tongues with an impressive WA cast of four, featuring Alexandria Steffensen, Catherine Moore, Luke Hewitt and Matt Edgerton. Thankfully, all lofty audience expectations have been exceedingly met. This small but mighty cast skilfully portray a range of multiple interconnected characters for the drama examining a twisted and tangled web of love, desire, trust, suspicion, infidelity and betrayal, creating an intercut narrative that lingers in the mind long after the curtain call. Those only familiar with the film — starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Kerry Armstrong and Rachael Blake — will find this theatrically structured origin story a rather different but just as haunting non-linear journey, as it looks at the complexity of relationships and the mystery surrounding a woman’s disappearance and her single stiletto. Bower’s production returns Speaking In Tongues to the proscenium arch theatre setting, while creating a surreal-like quality with its sound and lighting design by Mark Haslam and Ash Gibson Greig. It’s dream-like motif is amplified by the use of video projection, abstract lighting, a mirror ball and fly tower on Fiona Bruce’s sparse yet perfectly ample set design. The three-part play retains its 1990s setting and the technology of the time it was written before smartphones, crucially embracing the formerly familiar public phone box and answering machine. Bovell named his play in reference to the notion of speaking but not being heard or understood, a metaphor for relationships and the kind of breakdown of communication that can occur within them, especially if experiencing a feeling of middle-aged numbness. The result is an intimate and honest evening of theatre that does not fear thorny subjects and challenging conversations but embraces them. 4 stars Speaking In Tongues is at Heath Ledger Theatre until September 14.