Andrew Bovell’s script for Speaking in Tongues is close enough to the popular domestic marital dramas of his peers David Williamson and Joanna Murray-Smith to be a mainstay of Australian theatre.

It is, however, an outlier, with a subterranean strangeness emerging beneath its onstage debates about infidelity and social morality. This gives the play, at times, an almost existentialist ambience – closer to postwar French theatre and cinema than to Australian domestic drama.

The current Black Swan production, directed by Humphrey Bower, brings out a growing nightmarish sense of dread over the course of the evening, aided by a solid ensemble cast and semi-abstract tableaux that frame each scene.

Black Swan State Theatre Company’s Speaking in Tongues. Photo © Daniel James Grant

The script begins with two couples, each considering an act of infidelity with the other’s partner, using nearly the same words and actions. Bower prefaces the action with a slow, mildly erotic dance sequence as the couples sashay to the Mexican torch song Piensa en mi. In most productions, the subsequent intercutting proposition scene is played with each couple in their own space on either side of the stage. Bower,...