JACARANDA THEATRE,
in conjunction with the
Imperial War Museum
and the Menzies Centre of Australian Studies
present a rehearsed
reading of:
THE ONE DAY
OF THE YEAR,
23rd April, Imperial
War Museum
Playwright Alan Seymour has
mixed
feelings about The One
Day of the Year. Naturally, he's proud of the enduring play he wrote
in 1958 for an
amateur playwriting
competition.
A play which contains
the once-heretical perspective that Anzac Day - the proud emblem of
Australia's military sacrifice - was founded on confused ideals and
often degenerated into a squalid orgy of drunkenness and street brawls.
The One Day of the
Year was inspired
by an article in the University of Sydney newspaper Honi Soit
lambasting Anzac Day. The article, says Seymour, was considerably more
strident than the photo essay about drunken diggers concocted by the
play's young characters: a university student, Hughie Cook, and his
North Shore girlfriend Jan Castle.
Seymour saw the Honi
Soit article as an emblem of a generational shift, the chasm between
an older Australia that venerated the Anzacs and a younger voice
disgusted by war and ready to question the past.
His own impressions of
the commemoration were shaped in the 1950s when he ventured into Sydney
on an Anzac Day morning from his home in the city's inner-west. He
returned to a frightening scene - drunken men brawling and vomiting in
the street.
This alcohol-fuelled
debasement is represented in the play by the working-class father Alf
Cook. Belligerent and resentful of foreigners and anyone with an
education, Alf clings to Anzac Day like a drowning sailor clings to a
life raft. Boozing is just part of a noble tradition.
"I'm a bloody Australian,
mate, and it's because I'm a bloody Australian that I'm gettin' on the
grog. It's Anzac Day this week, that's my day, that's the old digger's
day."
More
than 40 years after its first, controversial staging in Adelaide - it
was banned by the Adelaide Festival in 1960, but put on by a defiant
amateur theatre group - the play evokes uncertainty and even anxiety in
the 75-year-old playwright.
The play's perspective on
Anzac Day earned it instant notoriety when it was unleashed on
conservative, Menzies-era Australia. On the first night of the 1960
Adelaide production a policeman was stationed at the stage door. In
1961, at the first professional season in Sydney, a bomb scare during a
dress rehearsal forced police to clear the theatre.
But notoriety fades. The
play has endured because of its finely drawn portrait of a
father-and-son relationship. Alf and Hughie are divided by Hughie's
shifting world view, but united by deep family bonds. It's an immensely
powerful struggle. As Seymour puts it: "The crux of the play is that
Hughie is receiving an education of the mind, but he needs an emotional
education; he needs to feel."
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