What do we owe the people who raised us, and what does that debt cost us in return? For those who work themselves to the bone keeping a family afloat, when does sacrifice tip into self-erasure?

Break Of Day, a new play by Steve Rodgers, examines the lives of ordinary, working-class Australians who strive and schlep against all odds to make ends meet. A semi-autobiographical work, the play is a tribute to the essential and often invisible labour of supermarket workers, cleaners, nurses and others who keep the country running.

The script first came across director Sarah Goodes’ desk in 2021, but it is only now premiering at the Malthouse Theatre – an indication of just how long it takes to get new Australian work in front of audiences, and a quiet indictment of a system that too often fails to prioritise its own stories.

A single mum in a hardscrabble town

Pamela (Kat Stewart) is a single mum in a dead-end town, working the nightshift at a warehouse that belongs to a vast multinational logistics company.

Her daughter Rae (Sherry-Lee Watson), highly academic and focused, is in the throes of her final year of school. Rae is in love with Jedediah (Theo Clarke), an earnest young man who’s a keen dancer and performer and longs to stay in the town to make a difference to his........

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