Cover Image: Luke Hewitt, Catherine Moore, Alexandria Steffensen and Matt Edgerton navigate fractured relationships in Speaking in Tongues. Photo: Daniel J Grant.

Speaking in Tongues by Andrew Bovell
Presented by Black Swan State Theatre Company
Heath Ledger Theatre, 28 August

Even though the characters in Andrew Bovell’s 1996 contemporary classic Speaking in Tongues are from the same mixed-up middle-class milieu who populate the plays of David Williamson, Joanna Murray-Smith and Hannie Rayson they’re actually a universe away.

Williamson’s entitled talkers know exactly what they want to say, turning over and savouring their zingers like steaks sizzling on a barbecue. The interconnected carnal explores in Speaking in Tongues, on the other hand,struggle mightily to understand and embrace their desires or even express what they’re feeling — so much so the play itself feels as if it’s always on the verge of collapse into incoherence. 

Rarely has the title of a work more accurately described its method and its meaning.

Speaking in Tongues begins in a familiar enough fashion, with two couples — Leon (Luke Hewitt) and Jane (Catherine Moore), Pete (Matt Edgerton) and Sonja (Alexandria Steffensen) — dancing to a sultry Latin number. They’re in the same space but separated, literally and metaphorically, and doing the same thing (“mirror images of each other”, writes Bovell in the published text), setting up the fluid, understated surrealism of the rest of the play.

The elegant eroticism of the opening moment quickly fades as the couples retreat to their hotel rooms and begin a far less graceful dance of seduction, resistance and retreat as we learn that they have unwittingly and comically ended up in the arms of each other’s partners.

Instead of cutting between the two scenes, as you would find in a conventional middle-class marital comedy, Bovell mashes-up and deconstructs the illicit entanglements, with each of the characters echoing and talking over the top of each each other in a polyphony of confusion and exasperation. 

This opening stanza of Speaking in Tongues presents a big challenge to the performers, who have to engage the audience at the same time as struggling to engage with each other. 

On the opening night the incantatory roundelay didn’t quite reach its full comic potential, so much so it weakened the subsequent dialogues in which the couples come face to face with their actions or, in one of the cases, inactions.  Something was just a little off in its pacing and emphasis, leaving the audience not quite as hooked as it should have been.

The production hit its straps after the interval, when the four actors morph into another troubled quartet battling to communicate and connect, this time with tragic consequences as a therapist named Valerie (Moore) desperately tries to reach her husband (Edgerton) after her car breaks down on a lonely country road. 

It is in the second part that director Humphrey Bower elevates Speaking in Tongues to the level of previous Black Swan productions of Bovells’s work, Adam Mitchell’s legendary version of When the Rain Stops Falling (2011) and Kate Champion’s exhilarating Things I Know to Be True (2023), which started Bower in the role of the family patriarch Bob Price.

For all the talk in his work Bovell is one of the most cinematic Australian playwrights, allowing Bower to open up this chamber piece and fill the big space of the Heath Ledger Theatre by giving it a subtly surreal quality, replete with proscenium arch and David Lynchian red curtains, furniture dripping down from the flys, fog drifting into scenes and momentarily enshrouding actors and Mark Haslam’s eye-popping Dark Wood-like projections expressing the aloneness, despair and confusion of the characters.

The other lovely cinematic touch was the use of the heartbreakingly beautiful Mexican love song Piensa En Mi, which Pedro Amodovar fans know from his 1991 film High Heels. Bower and composer/sound designer Ash Gibson Greig use it at the beginning of the play (the dance scene) and bring it up throughout, with and without the immortal voices of Luz Casal and Chavela Vargas, so it acts like movie theme music. The song’s surging teases out the undercurrent of desire in this increasingly confused, labyrinthine world.

Bovell is a difficult author to pin down because he is at once highly theatrical — all of his work is full of touches that are purely for the stage, such as the opening jumble of voices— yet highly naturalistic in his use of dialogue. There is lots of comedy in Speaking in Tongues, but it is understated and flows from the situation as opposed to the Williamson-esque look-at-moi funny lines. 

This mix of theatricality and naturalism is a challenge for both the actors and the director, who must carefully calibrate each moment to both engage the audience and communicate its layers of meaning.

While the first part didn’t quite click on the opening night you feel it will get better and better throughout the run. A little more pace will draw out the comedy of the situation of criss-crossed lovers and stand in contrast to the darkness of parts two and three, when the consequences of marital breakdown, miscommunication and betrayal are played out.

The second half, however, was superb from the opening moments, with Hewitt morphing beautifully into a broken-hearted man clinging to a faded relationship and bunch of letters, Stefansson revealing the deep sense uncertainty and regret lurking inside a woman with a track record of fleeing relationships, Moore compelling as the damaged shrink trying to dispense advice while grappling with her own marital crisis and Edgerton wrapped in torment and confusion as a man who unwittingly played a role in a woman’s death.

All of these stories are interlinked in the manner of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, the major influence on Bovell when he wrote Speaking in Tonguesand eventually turned  it into Lantana, which was directed by Ray Lawrence who later directed Jindabyne which was based on stories by Raymond Carver, whose stories were the basis for Short Cuts (like I said — lots of interconnections).

Astutely, Bower and Bovell have chosen not to update Speaking in Tongues, despite the prominent role played by the phone box in which an increasingly desperate Valery tries to reach her husband.

It both highlights the surreal, trapped-in-time quality of the whole play — the repetitions of the opening scene that continue throughout — and a reminder that the misunderstandings that damage relationships are exactly the same despite the updated means of communication being analogue or digital.

Speaking in Tongues is the first major work in the career of one of Australia’s most important playwrights and sets the template for his film and television work to come. Bower and his Black Swan team both honour a significant decades-old work and freshen it up, enlivening Bovell’s stylistic innovations with some cool contemporary touches without overwhelming the original. It’s beautifully judged.

Speaking in Tongues is on at the Heath Ledger Theatre until September 14.

For more information, visit:
https://blackswantheatre.com.au/season-2025/speaking-in-tongues