Dark thoughts from Down Under

Andrew Bovell's Speaking in Tongues is a seriously grown-up play. Spinning through a tangle of urban relationships, it looks at the tiny details that send a couple from contemplating infidelity over into actually committing it.

It touches on the weight of anticipated betrayal, questions of unshakeable trust and the possibility of missing out on the grand love of your life.

So compulsive is its examination of sickly relationships and so hip to contemporary social malaises, it becomes impossible not to see Bovell's better-known role, as the screenwriter for Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, in a new light.

Was I wrong to watch the movie simply as a spangly love story set in the over-made-up world of competition dancing? "No, Strictly Ballroom really was just a piece of fluff," says Bovell, with an unapologetic smile. Luhrmann, it seems, was a blast to work with. It was his first film as director and Bovell's first attempt at a screenplay. The whole thing seemed to come together through Luhrmann's winningly collaborative working style.

Nearly a decade later, and with not a sequin in sight, Bovell is dressed in a kind of earnest activist uniform of Dr Martens, grey buzz-cut, spectacles, jeans and tucked-in shirt. He looks much more like the man who writes political theatre for Australian trade unions and who was one of the prime movers behind a season of shows in Australia tagged "Who's Afraid of the Working Class?" than a flamboyant Luhrmann associate.

Just to queer the pitch a little, it is probably worth mentioning that behind the Billy Bragg styling is a man who lives with his family on a nice, non-working farm in the Australian countryside where he presses his own olive oil.

The great relationship doom-sayer contemplates his place on the modern emotional dancefloor: "I have been with the same woman since I was 21, I have three kids and being a father means everything to me; it is as complex and chaotic as any other life and as dysfunctional as any other family, but it is a good place to be and maybe this saves me from the darkness," he admits.

"Speaking in Tongues presents moral quandaries that surrounded my life and my peers in the mid-Nineties - people were losing a clear grasp of the moral terrain in the way we loved one another. Everywhere around me relationships were going wrong; the play comes out of a desire to understand that, and why things are so complex between men and women."

Those who have heard enough about "Mars and Venus doing the grocery shopping" to last them well into the next galaxy will be relieved to learn that Bovell is strictly opposed to this kind of reductionism. "The fascination for me is the reversal of perception, the change of point of view," he explains; which makes it as hard to determine right and wrong for the audience as it is for the characters on stage. "I am fascinated by what keeps us together long-term; separation is very easy, infidelity is very easy..." he sighs.

Andrew Bovell seems super-aware of the various issues and pains that surround him, but his interest in love and emotion does not stem entirely from modern matters. "I think most playwrights tend to explore their childhood rather than their adulthood," he explains, "and my parents had a very complex relationship, which I suppose I am continuing to explore. Hopefully, Speaking in Tongues can speak to anyone who loves and makes mistakes and has dark thoughts."