Alton Fringe Theatre presented Things I Know To Be True, a serious and moving contemporary drama exploring bonds uniting a family and fault lines dividing it.

Andrew Bovell’s play is set in Australia but minimal textual changes created an English setting. The cast of six included Fringe stalwarts and new younger actors. All were stunningly good.

The set in Alton College’s Wessex Arts Theatre was symbolic: oranges in a fruit bowl, perhaps an oblique allusion to Jeanette Winterson’s novel, roses in the garden for idealised love. Leonard Cohen songs set the mood.

This modern play explored a timeless theme, so the opening resembled the chorus in a Greek tragedy, hinting at a child’s subsequent death.

The youngest Price family member was Rosie. Meg Berg captured perfectly her starry-eyed idealism, yearning for European gap year romance, and naïve vulnerability. Abandoned and robbed in Berlin by her three-day lover, she just wants to go home to her family.

Parents Bob and Fran - Simon Brencher and Angela Cross - conveyed the humdrum reality of domestic life built around children. Bickering continues when Rosie appears. One parent turns mediator while the other remains critical or angry, then these roles are reversed by loving parents trying to understand their children.

The older children arrive. First busy professional and mother-of-two Pip, out of love with her husband. Jane Gray brought energy and self-confidence while leaving the audience knowing she wanted fulfilment.

Next came financier Ben - director Joseph de Peyrecave-Moore - equally hurried and intense. Then Mark, silent on splitting with his girlfriend: Chris Lang sensitively portrayed a man increasingly uncomfortable in his body.

This lively pace continued, with four different siblings feeling dissatisfied with their lives and misunderstood by their parents, their nostalgic monologues poignant.

Personal crises and rising emotional temperatures followed, but we kept believing in and empathising with the characters.

Pip is leaving her husband, to her parents’ chagrin. Mark wants a sex change. Bob and Fran reluctantly accepted he was gay, but his wish to transition is beyond them.

Balance between sympathy for Mark’s plight and his parents’ inability to accept his solution was finely managed. These complex issues had no easy resolution, but there was mutual love: Bob kissed Mark farewell at the airport with pathos.

Ben admits stealing money at work, rolling his eyes when his father doesn’t understand “skimming”. His self-justification enrages his father, but again the other parent, Fran, rescues the situation with a plan for redemption.

Rosie leaves and the parents are alone. Fran goes to work and the phone rings, repeating the opening scene. Pip, Ben and Mark, now Mia, respond to tragic news in a way that emphasises their shared ties - “Please, God. Not her,” - while Rosie tells how their mother died in a car crash after falling asleep from worry and exhaustion.

So it was not one of the children. Older Rosie has put her personal disappointment in perspective. Life goes on. There cannot have been a dry eye in the house. It was a deeply moving finale, drama at its very best.

Peter Allwright