Time travelling to Stephen Vagg’s new play

By the The Constellation Team

The events leading up to Stephen Vagg’s play The First Night (of ‘The One Day of the Year’)

What started it all?

Anzac Day 1955 – Summer Hill, Sydney

The 28-year-old Perth-born writer, Alan Seymour, was on his way home after attending the annual Anzac Day march in Sydney where he worked as a drama writer for ABC Radio. He witnessed former soldiers drinking to excess and fighting outside pubs. The “hollowness of the Anzac Day celebrations” struck him, and he started to percolate a new play that would deal with the Aussie Anzac myths: The One Day of the Year.

28 October to 23 November 1956 – John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger plays at London’s Royal Court Theatre

Osborne’s play introduces working class characters and encourages more social realism on the stage. As writer Alan Sillitoe quipped: “John Osborne didn’t contribute to British theatre: he set off a landmine called Look Back in Anger and blew most of it up. The bits have settled back into place, of course, but it can never be the same again.”

Australia’s own social realists would soon follow, including Ray Lawler – The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) – Richard Beynon – The Shifting Heart (1957) – and of course Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year (1958).

24 April 1958 – Honi Soit issue no. 7

You could blame Clive James with fanning the flames of controversy that would soon dog Alan Seymour’s play. In 1958, 19-year-old Clive was Literary Editor of Honi Soit, the Journal of the Students’ Representative Council at the University of Sydney. He would have (or should have) read the contributing article ‘Lest We Forget?’ by ‘Geoffrey Havers’ (a pseudonym – do we know who the author really was? Was it Clive?)

This article called Anzac Day “a yearly pageant of necrophilia” and asked readers to consider the hypocrisy of some younger celebrants who drink too much and disgrace themselves in public. The piece never questioned the validity of the day for the relatives of those who gave their lives, and the ex-servicemen. But it did have a dig at the group who “finishes its marching and gets down to the serious business of pickling itself in alcohol and accosting prostitutes.”

6 May 1958 – Honi Soit issue no. 9

The Editor responds to reactions to ‘The Anzac Article’ … “During the past week, a hail of criticism has been directed at the University in general and myself in particular, because an article on Anzac Day was published in Honi Soit.”

The Editor defends the article as intended for students and not a wider audience, and to “get people to think about Anzac Day.” He also confirmed the journal’s attitude to censorship: the Council’s motion to not take action against the article was carried 16-nil.

22 May 1958 – Semper Floreat, vol. 28, no. 7

The University of Queensland Union journal, Semper Floreat, publishes the Honi Soit article in full, with a disclaimer … “The views are not necessarily those of the editors of SEMPER FLOREAT.”

1958 – a playwriting competition

Seymour’s inspired play, The One Day of the Year wins the Adelaide Festival playwriting competition, and a performance at the inaugural Festival in 1960. However, the Board of Governors reject the play, fearing offence over its views on Anzac Day.

1960 – saved by the amateurs

In 1960, 42-year-old Glasgow-born actor, producer and director, Jean Marshall, decided that Seymour’s play would go on. With financial support from the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, she put together a cast and crew and produced and directed the first performance by the Adelaide Theatre Group at Willard Hall from 20 to 24 July 1960. Because of the controversy surrounding the play, she and her team receive death threats – as did the playwright – and there was a heavy police presence on opening night. The cast include veterans of Adelaide’s theatre scene, Patsy Flannagan and Francis Flannagan, with Terry Stapleton – who had appeared in a 1959 Adelaide production of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

1961 – all eyes on London

Alan Seymour moves to London, where The One Day of the Year is performed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in October 1961. The cast were all Australian, performing a revised version of the play, directed by Perth-born British-Australian Raymond Menmuir.

Clive James completes his University of Sydney degree and sets sail for London, where he lives for the next 50-plus years and makes his mark as a journalist, writer, broadcaster, poet and popular culture figure.

1962 – Enter TV

Two productions of The One Day of the Year were filmed for TV – an Australian and a British production produced by James Ormerod. As far as we know, no copies survive.

1963 – a counter-culture change

Former editors from Honi Soit, Richard Walsh and Peter Grose, leave Australia to go to London where they co-found Oz magazine.

And later?

In the 1960s and 1970s, Alan Seymour writes at least 10 more plays, and works as a TV writer, producer and commissioning editor for the BBC, and a theatre critic for The Observer in the UK. He and his partner live in Turkey from 1966 and 1971. He won a BAFTA award in 1984. The One Day of the Year becomes a fixture in the Australian school curriculum.

2007 – Alan Seymour is awarded an Order of Australia Medal for services to the arts.

March 2015 – Alan Seymour passes away, aged 87, in Darlinghurst, Sydney.

May 2015 – London’s Finborough Theatre revives The One Day of the Year, directed by former Sydney Theatre Company Artistic Director, Wayne Harrison.

2021 to 2025 – Stephen Vagg picks up the story

Award-winning Brisbane writer, playwright and screenwriter, Stephen Vagg (Rod Taylor: An Aussie in Hollywood, All My Friends Are Returning to Brisbane, All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane), is studying at Macquarie University. His PhD on the History of Australian Television Plays from 1956 to 1969 is a period of intense research that inspires Stephen to write about Alan Seymour’s play and its opening night at Willard Hall in Adelaide.

In 2024, his play The First Night (of the One Day of the Year) is submitted to the Astra Nova programme, which works with professional (and emerging) Queensland writers to introduce their work to Brisbane audiences at Ad Astra’s new theatre.

10 December 2025 – the opening of Cosmos at Ad Astra

Ad Astra audiences will have the chance to see Stephen’s play develop, starting with a one-night-only rehearsed reading in the new Cosmos creative space at Ad Astra – Brisbane’s newest theatre – at 210 Petrie Terrace. Book your tickets here.