Telling us who we are by showing us who we were

[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 3, No. 1  14 April - 12 May 2008 ]

Melbourne Theatre Company Literary Adviser Paul Galloway muses over one of Australia’s most high-profile ANZAC stories – Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year

The Melbourne Theatre Company was there at the beginning. As the Union Theatre Repertory Company under the Artistic Director John Sumner, MTC gave Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year its first Melbourne season in 1961 and toured regional Victoria, eastern South Australia and Tasmania.

Back in Melbourne we gave it another eight-week season. And the production was filmed for television (for Channel Nine, in those wonder years when commercial television filmed one-off plays) and won the Logie for Best Drama.

There was some controversy with the play in the form of newspaper debate, but the most remarkable thing about it was its popularity. It proved to us once again in those culturally cringing days that there was an audience for Australian drama that discussed serious issues.

In 1986, the Company revived it, again under Sumner’s direction, yet while it drew fair-sized audiences, the response was somewhat disappointing. In his memoir Recollections at Play, Sumner discussed how the change in attitude in 25 years had affected the reception of the play:

“In the 1960s we were all concerned how Alf’s grotesque description of the ANZAC Day celebrations in the second act would be received. But the audience received it well and considered Hughie’s arguments against ANZAC day as sacrilegious. By the ‘80s, with sections of the community ‘tired of Gallipoli and ANZAC’, particularly since the Vietnam War, the approval for Hughie’s stance was much greater.”

It is difficult to say how a revival would be received today. Many of the things Hughie complained about in 1961 – the public drunkenness especially – are no longer part of the celebration. They have become historical curiosities.

On the other hand, attitudes are much more sympathetic towards ANZAC Day than 20 years ago. Our younger generations, especially, have embraced it as a national day of gratitude rather than mourning. They have made an imaginative leap between their own privileged lives and the blighted lives of earlier generations.

So perhaps the time forThe One Day of the Year has come round again, for after all, it is an examination of a time when the battlers that survived two World Wars and a Great Depression had to confront their educated, cashed up and uncomprehending children. It is about Hughie and Jan’s failure to make that imaginative leap – perhaps this time they, not Alf and his digger mates, will be seen as the hidebound and blinkered ones.

Plays become classics, not because they have a message for all time, but because as times change we keep finding new messages in them. In that sense,The One Day of the Year may be an Australian classic. Like Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Alan Seymour’s play tells us who we are through the simple process of showing us who we were.