Red Sky Morning

Red Sky Morning
Tom Holloway
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
Until September 27


Having won a slew of awards with Beyond the Neck and Don’t Say the Words, Tom Holloway is fast emerging as one of our rising star playwrights. Good for him.

Red Sky Morning is not one of those award winning plays, or at least it shouldn’t be though it probably will due to the mindless follower nature of our awards bodies. Danny has a feeling, though he can’t check Google because his internet is down, that it already netted Holloway the RE Ross.

Not for lack of talent in the writing however, let’s not get caught up in semantics. Holloway is a very fine writer and this play too demonstrates it. His weaving together of the choppy and broken dialogue is skillfully handled, though it is seriously over used. The test of Red Sky Morning is less a symphony and more a cacophony but writers are sometimes wont to overuse a simple device and drive it into the ground.

More questionable is his repeated hammering of his black dog motif (I wont insult my readers by explaining the tired symbolism). In a play about depression and it’s potentially disastrous amplification in the typically communication paralyzed Australian country family, having each of the characters interact or hallucinate a large black dog just reeks of laziness of thought.

Indeed, typical is the best way to describe the portrayal of depression in each of the characters. Mum’s a physical affection starved alcho who can’t talk to her family, daughter’s troubled young lass who beat the tar out of her best friend at school because she can’t handle the emotional turmoil of her home life and Dad’s a taciturn country type who can’t talk to his family and ends up on his knees in his shed with a gun in his mouth. The shed’s a particularly nice touch of banality in these home and away suicides waiting to happen.

The performances from Red Stitch, as always, are faultless. David Whitely, Erin Dewar and Sarah Sutherland all handle the text like pros and bring a touching humanity to their performances. Whitely in particular approaches heartbreaking with his soft spoken and gentle father. Sam Strong’s direction is at its best in its stillness. Some of the movement is a little awkward but is compensated by the depths he and his actors find in their characters.

Unfortunately in this city of mindless barking sycophants Danny has little doubt that there will be moved silence and the odd bit of discrete weeping in the stalls of Red Stitch over the coming month. Everyone can indulge their empathetic and compassionate sides and have the depression lite experience for an evening. It’s only an hour long so it won’t even be too taxing. Particularly as the trigger never gets pulled so there’s no consequence. Holloway walks us breathlessly to the edge of the abyss and points down into it as if to say, it’s a long way down, and then backs us safely away again.

Red Sky Morning demonstrates no real understanding of depression and consequently offers the audience no insight beyond a surface description of the condition. We all know what it looks like, show us what it is.

Danny Episode