Tom Holloway’s award-winning script, Red Sky Morning, is a powerful and poetic story about family, silence, and finding hope in the everyday and is the latest offering presented by Theatre Works as a part of their 2026 By Theatre Works programming.
For director Lyall Brooks the work was an immediate grab describing the play’s restraint as an enticing hook.
” It’s a play that doesn’t shout its themes at you – it lets them sit there, quietly, and trusts that you’ll feel the weight of them.
There’s also something deeply unsettling about how familiar it feels. These aren’t heightened, theatrical people – they’re recognisable. People you know. People you might be.”
Brooks says the play circles questions of isolation, masculinity, mental health, addiction, and the ways people try – and fail – to communicate under pressure. In regional contexts, that lands with particular force.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shitting on regional communities – I’m a country boy myself, born and bred. We’re a bloody tough, caring lot. But the “Tough Aussie Battler” myth we frequently roll out completely ignores the flip side of all the systems and support structures that don’t quite reach the people who need them.
Australia is very good at celebrating resilience and self-reliance – and less good at asking what it’s costing people to maintain it.“
Not driven by spectacle or big emotional moments, Red Sky Morning is a very intimate, restrained production, driven by silence, rhythm, and the spaces between. Artistically, the production draws on minimalism and cinematic pacing. It trusts the audience to lean in and sit with complexity.
“We’re not over-explaining anything,” says Brooks about his production choices. “There’s no safety net of constant exposition or emotional signposting. There’s enormous restraint.
Theatrically, though, it’s quite alive. There’s a strong physical language running through the piece, the design leans into something more abstract and expressive than strict naturalism, and the staging is doing a lot of really visceral work – rhythm, image, embodiment.
To “lean in” means the audience has to do a bit of the work. We’re not handing you a map, we’re inviting you to actively navigate the terrain with us – piece things together, sit in ambiguity – but in a really fulfilling way!”
And as far as the conversation Brooks hopes to engender with the work, he’s always interested in the conversations that happen after a show, not during it. “The ones where people go ‘I… didn’t quite know what to make of that… but I can’t stop thinking about it.’ When a play works, it doesn’t give you answers – it just removes your ability to ignore the questions.
If this particular work does anything, I hope it creates space for people to talk about things that are usually avoided: emotional responsibility, inherited behaviours, the things we don’t say until it’s too late.”
Holloway successfully uses interwoven monologues to tell his story, which, says Brooks, feel less like speeches and more like fragments of testimony. “Like people thinking out loud, trying to land on something truthful – and not quite getting there. Each character is constructing their own version of events, their own narrative logic.
What’s powerful are the gaps between those accounts, and the barely missed connections they could make. The tension lives in what isn’t shared, what doesn’t quite align.
In a more traditional, dialogue-driven structure, those contradictions might get resolved. Here, they don’t – and that’s where the drama sits.”
Brooks describes Holloway’s writing style as deceptively loose. “The characters circle things, they trail off, they fill space – there’s a lot of deflection, a lot of masking, a lot of talking around what actually matters.
But that’s exactly why it works. The audience starts to feel the shape of what’s unspoken. You don’t understand these characters through what they say – you feel them through what they can’t quite bring themselves to articulate.”
Brooks is an award-winning actor and theatre director, playwright, musical theatre performer and voiceover artist, and is the founding Artistic Director of new Australian writing theatre company, Lab Kelpie As a direcxto9r, he is drawn to work that explores masculinity, power, and responsibility – particularly the gap between how people see themselves and what they actually do. “I’m less interested in heroes and villains and more interested in the moment someone realises they might be both.”
He’s also often drawn to stories about people under pressure – moments where personal ethics, relationships, and systems collide. “I’m interested in work that asks difficult questions without simplifying them.”
Tom Holloway’s award-winning script, Red Sky Morning, captures the heart of regional Australia; the early mornings, the long silences, the unspoken care that holds families together. With sharp wit and tender honesty, it reflects the challenges and strengths of small-town life, where connection is both fragile and essential.
Says Brooks, “Come for the writing, absolutely – but also come to watch three exceptional actors at the top of their game.
This is a physically demanding, emotionally precise piece of theatre. It asks a lot of the performers, and they’re meeting it head-on – there’s something really thrilling about watching that level of craft and commitment up close.
It’s not just a play you listen to; it’s one you experience. It‘s electric.”
May 6 – 16
