Review - Red Sky Morning - Red Stitch Actors Theatre

Strange Interlude*
Red Stitch Theatre’s new initiative of presenting work by local writers gets underway with a piece that is sheer virtuosity as text as well as performance. The story is of a day in the frustrating lives of a family whose channels of communication have broken down through an inability to name, let alone do anything, about the wife/mother’s alcoholism. Peter Mumford’s set brilliantly locates the small town locale in a space with red dirt floor, laminex table, corrugated iron sheet across the back and, on three sides, venetian blinds. Throughout the play we peer into the lives of the three characters, father, mother and daughter through the venetians. Tom Holloway’s masterful script takes us one step further, into their very minds. Unable to confront the woman’s addiction all three no longer talk to one another. Instead of conventional dialogue, the actors speak their characters inner thoughts. The metaphor of the set becomes more apparent as the play progresses, peering into theprotagonist's thoughts via the text and peering into their environment via the box set edged with venetian blinds. These interior monologues, unheard by the other characters, propel the action toward a near fatal conclusion.

Unlike spoken words, thoughts can process many physical and emotional sensations are once and each monologue is a complex of sensations which often run parallel to each other and occasionally overlap, one word intruding from one monologue into another, like the baton in relay race, handed seamlessly from one to another, the family obviously attuned to each other’s fears and anxieties but not to speak.

Holloway’s text, as the programme note explains, was developed over many months and has attained a remarkable precision and clarity. In an early scene, where the family are waking at the start of the day, the juxtaposition of states of dreaming and waking are Joycian. In a similarly Joycian way Holloway’s internal dialogues examine sexual fantasies, an inopportune fart, the onslaught of a pimple or processing the feel of one’s own body in howlingly funny and obsessive detail. With the same clinical precision he describes a mind talking itself into committing suicide (the original title was to have been Love My Black Dog, 'Black Dog' referring to Winston Churchill's nickname for his lifelong depressive episodes which make the repeated sightings in the play of a mysterious and threatening dog all the more potent). Holloway employs the device of comedy giving way quickly to deep drama as well as he employs words. The three actors realise this rich and multi-faceted text, coinciding the words they speak together or apart, as well as the author has written them. Whitely, Sutherland and Dewar miraculously never miss a beat as though they were expert singers guided by an invisible conductor in singing a great and tragic madrigal. Like the most complex of Beckett’s writings in combining physical, psychological and spiritual states, Red Sky Morning is a remarkable theatrical experience.
Red Sky Morning (2008) by Tom Holloway
Man – David Whiteley
Woman – Sarah Sutherland
Girl – Erin Dewar
Director – Sam Strong
Set Design – Peter Mumford
Lighting Design – Danny Pettingill
Red Stitch Actors Theatre, St Kilda
27 August – 27 September 2008
55 minutes (no interval)
* Strange Interlude was Eugene O'Neill's most experimental play. In it he introduced internal monologues which were spoken by a character but which were unheard by other characters.