A Director's Note from Lyall Brooks | Red Sky Morning
- May 5
- 2 min read
Some stories are told directly. Others arrive sideways – in fragments, hesitations, and the things left unsaid. At its heart, Red Sky Morning is a play about people reaching for connection and missing – sometimes by inches, sometimes by miles. It’s in the emotional pressure sitting just beneath the surface – the things these characters can’t quite articulate – that the story emerges. The audience is asked to listen not just to the words, but to the gaps between them – and the echoes that gather in their repetition. I often feel it as a kind of chilly draft, moving through the cracks of the text.
This is a play shaped by place. By regional life, where resilience is worn as a badge of honour – the “little Aussie battler” pushing on, holding steady. But we rarely stop to ask what this celebrated resilience costs. What gets swallowed, deferred, or passed down. As a country boy myself, this production is both a recognition and a love letter: to the strength of those communities, and to the quieter, darker, more complicated inheritances they carry.
Our approach has been to place deeply naturalistic performances inside a more abstract physicality and a sculptural, shifting world – something closer to memory than reality. A landscape shaped by water, distance, and time. Not a literal home, but an emotional one.
My deep gratitude to Di Toulson for trusting me with this work that forms part of her extraordinary legacy. The entire Theatre Works team, and especially our practically perfect show leader Jade, thank you. To Seon for keeping me and the cast in line, and offering more creative input I could hope for, thank you.
Finally, it has been an unequivocal privilege to work with three extraordinary actors in Alpha, Emma and Izabella, and our design team Harry, Sidney and Jack, who have built a world that holds – and unsettles – us.
We hope you find yourself somewhere in it.
- LYALL BROOKS, DIRECTOR
Red Sky Morning plays at Theatre Works 6 - 16 May, before going on a Regional Victorian tour.
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