ACTOR Eugenia Fragos is the perfect person to fill us in on the new play, “Things I Know To Be True”, shortly coming to The Playhouse, for not only is she acting in it but she is married to the playwright, Andrew Bovell.

Bovell is known to the wider public as the writer of “Speaking In Tongues”, which became the film “Lantana”, and for the stage adaptation of Kate Grenville’s “The Secret River”. Fragos has been seen on screen as Ari’s mum in “Head On”, as Hector’s sister in “The Slap” and Isaac’s mum in “Dead Europe”, all adapted from books by Christos Tsiolkas. Unsurprisingly, she plays Fran, the mum in “Things I Know To Be True”, but she doesn’t mind one bit.

“Andrew and I met at drama school 30 years ago at the Victorian College of the Arts. He was doing the writing stream and I was doing acting,” Fragos tells “CityNews” by phone from Adelaide.

“It’s great to be working together after five or six years.”

But it’s not just any kind of work. Collaborative theatre is what she likes, the kind of thing she and Bovell did back in the good, old days at the Melbourne Workers Theatre where they got to create with Tsiolkas, Melissa Reeves and Patricia Cornelius.

That was before their children started growing bigger, so the pair bought a farm in SA to be near her family.

“I conceded defeat and realised I needed my mum… then somehow Andrew’s career took off but mine, well, not so much.”

But in recent years she’s had plenty of work on stage with the State Theatre Company of SA and elsewhere.

Fragos still looks back on their 20 years in Melbourne, where they joined with “The Slap” producer Tony Ayres and Michael McMahon to buy two houses and pulled down the intervening fence.

“We were married early and among the few to have kids, so if you can’t go out you say: ‘You’re welcome to come to our house and talk around the kitchen table’ – there was an immense creativity about it all, she says.

Bovell’s newest play is a kind of Australian family epic, which comes to Canberra immediately after its Adelaide premiere and will then go to a six-theatre tour in Britain.

So what’s it like having your husband there in rehearsals? Does he behave himself?

“He does,” Fragos concedes, “but the directors and the actors are very respectful to him and he’s a really good collaborator. I don’t skite much about my husband, but so much of his work has been in collaboration.”

Working with the co-directors, Geordie Brookman, artistic director of State Theatre Company SA, and Scott Graham, artistic director of Britain’s Olivier Award-winning company Frantic Assembly, has been a career highlight for Fragos.

In the finished play Fragos plays the mother of four, the major breadwinner because her husband Bob has been retrenched from Mitsubishi. But she is a mother with a temper and she would kill for her kids. She and Bob, now empty nesters just like the Bovells, have been together since they were very young, so this is the portrait of a long-term marriage.

A phone call comes in the middle of the night. The parents wonder which of the kids is in trouble or hurt or dead. The play moves back in time and all those kids come to the foreground.

And who is that on the other end of the phone line?

That would be telling, Fragos says, you’ll just have to be there to find out.

“Things I Know To Be True”, The Playhouse, June 9-11, bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.