Break of Day

Break of Day began with my parents. My Dad’s first night shift job at BHP and my Mum’s first job in a hospital dietary department. The play explores their sacrifice, especially my Mum’s, but all mums, the heroes they are, often holding families, and communities together.   

The writing and research grew out of the years I spent in supermarkets and pubs, stacking shelves, pouring beers, dreaming of working in the theatre.  

Its heart belongs to the cleaners, nurses, warehouse and aged care workers, who keep watch, while the rest of us sleep. It belongs to the teachers I taught with in South-West Sydney, where I saw how opportunity is too often determined by postcode and income, and how education will bridge that divide, if we level the playing field. 

The play is a celebration of new Australian stories, difficult to develop, brave to make, and sustained by theatre companies, actors, directors, and audiences who believe in creating a legacy from now. 

Like a child, the play took a village. I will be forever grateful to everyone who cared for it, so many hearts and minds, impossible to name you all here. Thank you. 

Yesterday, I read that AI’s impact on humanity will rival the discovery of fire. If that’s true, what will we do with it? Can it teach us to love better? To care for each other, despite our differences, even at our worst? To want for all children, not just our own, because somewhere in the caring, is the key to why we’re all here. 

Around 2021, Stevie sent me a copy of this play. I loved it.  

In 2024, after opening Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Kat Stewart at Red Stitch Actor’s Theatre — a production that went on to enjoy seasons at the Comedy Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company, and won Kat the Sydney Theatre Award for Best Actor — Malthouse got in touch to see if we wanted to pitch another show to work on together. 

After reading some classics by Edward Albee and Sam Shepard, Kat and I both felt we wanted to use the opportunity to invest in what might become the next Australian classic. So, I gave Break of Day to Kat to read. She loved it.  

With an endless stream of content flowing towards us, we have to choose what we want to value: what we want to pull from the river and hold onto. New Australian work by writers such as Stevie Rodgers — work lovingly and carefully developed over five years — deserves to be held up as something to value: a story about us, about family and about living through extraordinarily challenging times. 

From the beginning, I knew we needed to feel the town, and I had a strong sense of Pam’s slight dissociation: the feeling that she is looking at her life from a small distance, orbiting away from and towards something that is coming in and out of focus. 

Anna Cordingley, a brilliant designer who creates worlds where feelings come alive, put the town on a revolve. Composer & Sound Designer, Jethro Woodward, and I spoke often about the expansive, yearning inner lives of the characters, and how those lives are forced into pressurised spaces and routines — the gaps between dreams and means. Lighting Designer Paul Jackson, a master of the poetry of space, fills Anna’s world with intimacy, longing and tension. 

The cast are an extraordinary group of actors who together bring such warmth, compassion and humour to the characters Stevie has crafted. They have been a joy to work with. 

A huge thank you to the stage management team, Harry Dowling and Rosie Osmond, and to Assistant Director Keith Brockett. Thank you also to Margot Fenley, Intimacy Director; Lyndall Grant, Fight Choreographer; Kimball Wong, Movement and Dance; the incredible production and workshop teams led by Blair Hart and Goff Mameli; Casting Director Rhys Velasquez; and Vivia Hickman, Dean Bryant and Annie Bourke for inviting us in and looking after us all so beautifully. 

Thank you to Malthouse for believing in us and investing in us, and to you, the audience, for coming together to share this story.