by Stephen Vagg
Not many Australian plays have a long life – “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” seems to be the traditional trajectory. A few unicorns slip through the net however – the classic Williamsons, Away, Prima Facie, Cosi, Hotel Sorrento, and, going back further, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and The One Day of the Year. (NB There were lots of Australian plays written before these, some quite popular – eg Rusty Bugles, Robbery Under Arms – but they never get revived; presumably the public prefers to see Andrew Upton adaptations of Chekhov).
Anyway, The One Day of the Year was the second stage play from Alan Seymour, a Perth writer who’d moved to Sydney and in the 1950s was mostly working for ABC radio and television. He became the leading ABC screenwriter on the time (a field of maybe two, him and George F. Kerr) – but always adapting foreign stories: Tomorrow’s Child, The Governess, Citizen of Westminster, The Lark, Murder Story, Bodgie, One Bright Day, Richard II, Two Headed Eagle. He usually worked in collaboration with director Ray Menmuir – the two made a marvellous team, one of the greatest writer-director combos in Australian history.
Seymour’s first stage play, Swamp Creatures, was given a production in Canberra – and the Sydney Morning Herald kindly arranged for its third-rate drama critic Lindsey Browne to fly down there and pan it, while still crashing the opening night party – “and rolling around on the floor with the local belles until 4am and inviting everyone to call him ‘Lyn’” (Seymour’s words), while the Union Theatre in Melbourne sent up its head honcho, John Sumner, who has an undeserved reputation for supporting Australian plays (at least during this stage of his career, when his support would’ve been really useful) and he “hated” the play (again, Seymour’s words). So, Swamp Creatures was never professionally produced (though the ABC did film it in 1960).
Seymour pressed on and wrote another stage play, The One Day of the Year, which revolved around a family squabble over Anzac Day, inspired by an article in the Sydney Uni magazine Honi Soit which featured photos of drunken veterans on that day. For those who don’t know, the plot of the play centres around the working class Cook family: dad Alf is an elevator operator and World War Two veteran, whose rants about the state of the nation are tolerated by his wife Dot and old family friend Wacka (who was at Gallipoli in World War One) but not so much by his university student son Hughie. Hughie is particularly sick of Alf’s bragging about Anzac Day and takes photos of a bunch of boozy veterans to accompany text written by his upper class girlfriend Jan that is critical of the day. This sets off a family squabble.
The tone of the piece was very fifties kitchen sink-y: working class family, lots of ranting; you can feel (arguably) the influence of Look Back in Anger (mum cops a lot of ranting) and Death of a Salesman (Alf dreams of a promotion), but it’s absolutely Australian, beautifully written and observed. The play is famous for being about our attitudes towards Anzac Day but it’s also about the generation gap, the love and resentment fathers and sons have for each other, and the wealth divide in Australia (Jan’s family is rich while the Cooks are poor).
The play was recommended for production at the first Adelaide Festival in 1960, but this decision was overruled by the Festival’s governors on the grounds that its contents might offend ex-servicemen, particularly the RSL. An amateur group picked it up for production and successfully staged it at Willard Town Hall [there’s a whole play about a fictional imagining of this event which you can see on 10 December].
This production was seen by Neil Hutchison, who had taken leave of being head of ABC drama to run the Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Hutchison was generally not a fan of Australian writing and did a lot of damage to its development, but he liked (or didn’t hate) The One Day of the Year : he picked up the play for production at the Trust, there was a bomb threat on opening night, the show went on, reviews were good, the play went on tour (where despite being a small cast one set play it lost money – Hutchison wasn’t much of a manager), it was picked up for production in London, and was performed throughout the world. Alan Seymour went over to London for the premiere with his regular director Ray Menmuir. Producers asked him if he had any scripts and he produced Lean Liberty, a play commissioned by the ABC who then chickened out of making it (because it concerned an ex-communist who refused to apologise for his past) and wouldn’t pay his fee; British television put it on, Menmuir directed, and both Menmuir and Seymour went on to have highly successful careers in British television, though Seymour never managed to repeat the stage success of One Day of the Year.
Hutchison stayed in Australia, blocking Australian scripts wherever he could – though he knew how to swim with the tide: in 1961 the Adelaide Festival rejected another Australian play, The Ham Funeral by Patrick White, in part at Hutchison’s recommendation; again, an amateur group put it on, again, Hutchison put it on at the Trust; again, it became a classic. Those two plays – The One Day of the Year and The Ham Funeral – were the only two real achievements in Neil Hutchison’s time at the Trust (he and his successor Stefan Haag really drove it into the ground); as they say, a broken clock is right twice a day.
Anyway, The One Day of the Year was performed around the world (the generation gap is universal) and filmed for television in Britain, Canada, and Australia.
The Australian production wasn’t shot by the ABC – though the Commission did do a radio version, and used the play as an excuse not to buy Peter Yeldham’s superb Anzac Day television play Reunion Day, claiming it “cuts right across” The One Day of the Year and “the theme, the set up and the tone of the two plays are pretty much alike” (this was entirely untrue, incidentally).
One Day was filmed for commercial television as an episode of the General Motors Hour, a sporadic collection of television dramas whose episodes included The Grey Nurse Said Nothing and This is Television.
The Australian production of the One Day of the Year used the same cast that appeared in a stage production of the play at the Union Theatre, directed by John Sumner – who, as mentioned, had disliked Swamp Creatures, and like Hutchison wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about Australian playwriting but did allow for this one. The television version was directed by Rod Kinnear, who did some excellent work in Melbourne around this time. (Side note – Kinnear and Sumner would later collaborate on another General Motors Hour television play called Manhaul.)
We actually haven’t seen the 1962 television production of The One Day of the Year – to our knowledge no copy of it exists. However, a script does, at the National Film and Sound Archive, which we’ve read.
It’s not surprisingly very faithful. There are occasional nods to the medium of television like a close-up, and having characters overhear things. Hughie’s conflict with his father, Alf, is well drawn. Seymour writes with a great deal of empathy and warmth for both characters – he knows Alf is a man of prejudice and frustration, but Seymour feels for him. The female characters are, as has often been commented, less effective. Dot, the mum, is someone who others have scenes with, rather than a fully three-dimensional person. You need her in the play; it’s just a shame that she wasn’t given more to do. Jan, Hughie’s new girlfriend, isn’t depicted with as much warmth as the men, but at least has something stronger to play – upper class, dogged, very pointed on Anzac Day. The “X factor” of the play is Wacka, the World War One veteran. His account of the actual battle at Gallipoli is a show stopper; it was on stage and is on the page. We assume Rod Kinnear directed it well and the acting was strong.
Reviews were, as almost always for Australian written television plays, mixed, with a blistering notice from Frank Roberts of The Bulletin, probably the worst television critic in Australian history.
The BBC version was filmed with a cast of Australian expats including Reg Lye as Wacka, Madge Ryan as Dot Cook, and Kenneth J Warren as Alf. It was filmed in 1964 for Canadian television with Neil McCallum (so memorably dreadful as an Australian in Siege of Pinchgut. We haven’t seen these either – if anyone knows of a copy, please tell us!
In the late 1960s, film rights to Alan Seymour’s stage play came into the hands of Tony Buckley, then a leading editor (Wake in Fight) who would become a top producer (Caddie). He had a script written by Michael Thornhill, then best known as a film critic who later became a director with a very varied resume (FJ Holden, The Journalist) – according to Buckley it “was considered a good lively screenplay.”
Buckley was editing Adam’s Woman, a melodrama about an American convict (Beau Bridget) in colonial Sydney (with John Mills as a governor), produced by American Louis Edelman and financed by Warner Bros. According to Buckley, “Warner Bros. were delighted with what they saw and had asked Lou Edelman what he had next.”
Edelman became interested in The One Day of the Year. According to Buckley, “Edelman liked the script, but thought some of the dialogue would be difficult for the actors to ‘do’ Australian accents. American actors?? Australian accents?? Alarm bells began to ring loudly. So I pulled the plug there and then. I will stop here, suffice to say Lou Edelman never understood another country’s culture let alone start to respect the integrity of the ‘work’ being adapted for the screen.” It was no doubt the right call – there weren’t a lot of great films on Edelman’s resume, with Adam’s Woman being Exhibit A.
No film of The One Day of the Year was ever made. Thus the 1962 television play is the only Australian screen version… and that doesn’t seem to exist in audio visual form. It really is odd… until you consider that there’s no Australian feature film version of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (the bad American one doesn’t count) or The Shifting Heart either.
It’s never too late, incidentally – just putting that out there.
The author would like to thank Tony Buckley, Graham Shirley and the National Film and Sound Archive for their assistance with this article. Unless otherwise specified, all opinions are those of the author.
