One Day of the Year (play)

Alan Seymour, One Day of the Year (play)
Angus & Robertson, Sydney, hardcover 1962. 108 pages.
SIGNED first edition

Inscribed to a friend by author.
Includes original playbill from Palace Theatre Sydney, Christmas card and two clipped newspaper articles.
Condition: Very clean tight copy with original dust jacket, price-clipped.


About:
The One Day of the Year is an Australian play by Alan Seymour originally written in 1958 about Anzac Day.

Alf's son Hughie and his girlfriend Jan plan to document Anzac Day for the university newspaper, focusing on the drinking on Anzac Day. For the first time in his life Hughie refuses to attend the dawn service with Alf. When he watches the march on television at home with his mother and Wacka, he is torn between outrage at the display and love for his father.

The play was inspired by an article in the University of Sydney newspaper Honi Soit criticising Anzac Day and Seymour's own observations of how ex-servicemen behaved on that day. The character of Alf was based on Seymour's brother in law.

The play was rejected by the Adelaide Festival of Arts Board of Governors in 1960, but made its debut on 20 July 1960 as an amateur production by the Adelaide Theatre Group. Jean Marshall, the Director, and those involved in the Adelaide production received death threats. The first professional season was in April 1961 at the Palace Theatre in Sydney. It proved controversial and Seymour also received death threats however it was popular and there have been productions ever since. In 1961 Seymour travelled to London where the play was directed by Raymond Menmuir at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.