THE DAY THE SKY TURNED BLACK

Dark Day

The Day The Sky Turned Black plays at the PICA Performance Space from Tuesday, January 31, to Saturday, February 4. Bookings via pica.org.au.
Writer and actor Ali Kennedy-Scott remembers vividly where she was when Victoria burned in 2009.
“I was at drama school in Bristol when the Black Saturday bushfires happened,” she recalls. “And I think when anything like that happens to your country when you’re far away from it, you feel very strongly about it. I felt quite helpless, and I wasn’t able to do much when seeing the images and the story and all that. It makes you strongly want to do something, and also strongly realise how far you are from home.”
That sense of distance and disempowerment planted the first seeds of what would become the one-woman play The Day The Sky Turned Black, but it took an extra push to really get the ball rolling.
“There were a couple of comments,” Kennedy-Scott says. “Most people that I spoke to there were so supportive, but there were a few people that I encountered who said things like, ‘Oh, doesn’t Australia always get bushfires?’ and ‘Why do those people build their houses so close to the bush?’ and that kind of attitude, which made me want to give them the facts so I could say ‘No, this isn’t actually an ordinary bushfire. It’s actually threatening cities the size of Bendigo’. Let’s not blame the people. Our country’s full of bush; that’s just the way it is. I realised that there were the most incredible stories of bravery, and people pulling together, and people just not giving up. I was just so inspired by these stories that I thought it would be amazing to share them with people in the UK, and then to share them back home.”
Armed with her theatrical training and a strong desire to set the record straight, she threw herself into research upon her return to Australia, embarking on a long pre-production process.
“I interviewed a journalist who’d covered the bushfires in Victoria, and she became the first character in the play,” she tells us. “I spent the next six months working on it, interviewing people, and tracking down a psychologist who specialises in arson to understand bushfire arsonists. I came up with an hour long, one act series of monologues that follows five different characters: three survivors of the fire - a little boy, a school teacher, and a grandmother; the mother of an arsonist; and a journalist. The play traces from the day before the fires hit until the anniversary.”
And though the characters and events of the play are, strictly speaking, fictional, Kennedy-Scott was careful to portray the disaster as truthfully as possible, letting the facts carry the emotional weight of the narrative. “One character - Heidi, the journalist - is verbatim, but the other four are fictional. They’re based on things that would have happened, or did. For example, the little boy talks about the post box being the only thing of his house that survived, and I’d seen a photo of a post box with the whole house behind it destroyed. So there are different snippets conglomerated into these characters, I suppose.”

_TRAVIS JOHNSON