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Alan Seymour
Roger Stubbs:
When Alan Seymour's play, The One Day of the Year, based on the celebration of ANZAC Day, was first performed in 1960, it caused great controversy for the way it seemed to denigrate a great tradition. As more Australians saw it performed, a more balanced view emerged. Audiences appreciated its use of Australian vernacular and its exploration of an important issue, and Seymour, like Ray Lawler and David Williamson, now has a place in the history of the Australian theatre. Alans career as a writer began when he was fifteen years of age.
Alan did not have an easy start to life. He was the youngest child of nine, by fourteen years. His parents were elderly. At the age of seventy-one, his father, a waterside worker, was killed when struck by a sling load of timber. His mother died soon after. Aged nine years, Alan was now an orphan and was raised by his sister, May, and her husband. In a radio interview, Alan described how his working-class home had plenty of books and how his sister made sure he joined a library.
He attended East Fremantle State School from where he won a Secondary School Scholarship and was able to attend Perth Modern School, where he enrolled in 1940. Alan was hampered by problems with his vision and by his economic situation. He did not complete the Junior Certificate, but it should be noted that he did pass English, Latin, French and geography; his success with languages an indicator of what was to come.
Having left school aged fifteen, Alan quickly found employment with the commercial radio station 6PM as an announcer. The station recognised his talent and had him write and produce short radio plays which were broadcast live. By his late teens he was the film critic and an announcer for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Perth. He also wrote short stories and feature articles for The Western Mail.
Alan was active in amateur theatre in Perth. In 1950 his production of Strindberg’s The Father won the 1950 Western Australian Drama Festival Award. Alan and two of his fellow actors won individual awards. The Father was a challenging choice for an amateur group and its twenty-three-year-old producer, but its themes reflected an emerging seriousness that was to penetrate Alan’s work.
In 1949 Alan met his life partner, Ron Baddeley, another Modernian and a Royal Australian Air Force war veteran. Following Alan’s success in the West Australian Drama Festival, they moved to Sydney were Alan became a freelance drama writer for the Australian Broadcasting Commission and was the theatrical producer for an opera group. His first play, Swamp Creatures, was a finalist in London’s The Observer play competition in 1958.
In 1960 Alan was commissioned by Perth’s Channel 7 to write The Runner, one of the first original Australian dramas presented on Australian television. It dealt with a young runner’s ambitions to break every possible record and how his obsession led to the loss
Alan Seymour, radio broadcaster, c.1946. Photo courtesy of West Australian Newspapers Ltd.
of his fiancee and the friendship of his trainer and mentor. The theme of the play was about the challenge of working hard to achieve success in sport but keeping a balance in life. Channel 7 s lawyers thought the most prominent athlete of that time, Herb Elliott, might take exception to the message of the play and sent him the script. Herb wrote back that he thoroughly approved of what the script was saying and thought it needed to be said.
The One Day of the Year was his next play. Set against the celebration of ANZAC Day, the play examines the tensions between Hughie and his father, Alf, and focuses upon the then more ugly aspects of the commemoration. Hughie questions the drunken excesses and violence that so often used to follow the solemnity of the remembrance services at dawn. Alf has a different view:
I’m bloody Australian, mate, and it’s because I’m a bloody Australian that I’m getting on the grog Its ANZAC Day this week, that’s my day, that’s the old digger’s day.
When first performed in 1960 the play generated great controversy but it was also a time when traditional values were beginning to be questioned and there was resistance to the extremely conservative values expressed by some servicemen’s organisations. The play was a success. Like Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, The One Day of the Year resonated with audiences because of its Australian subject matter and its use of Australian vernacular.
The controversy eased and the expression, ‘the one day of the year’, has become an Australian cultural icon. For many years the text featured on the reading lists for study in schools. In 2003, when the play was again performed, the drama critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, Richard Jinman, wrote:
The play has endured because it is a finely drawn portrait ofafather-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.
In 1961 Alan went overseas for the London production of The One Day of the Year, earning his living as a writer. In London he worked as a theatre critic, and as a script writer, producer and commissioning editor for the British Broadcasting Corporation. For a time he lived in Turkey to concentrate on his writing. He returned to Australia in 1995.
It was for his work in London that he earned his international reputation. Too extensive to list, highlights include, scripts for The Dirtwater Dynasty, Tudawali and The House of Elliot, and the adaptation for television of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis), Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Lewis), The Potato Factory (Courtenay) and Sara Dane (Gaskin).
His adaptation for television of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, a television series of six episodes, provided the means for its cast and crew to win three BAFTA Awards: for Best Children’s Programme, for Best Video Lighting, and for Best VTR Editor. In 1979 the Royal Television Society gave his adaptation for television of L.P. Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda a special creativity award.
In 2002 the University of Western Australia awarded Alan an honorary doctorate. In 2007 he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the arts as a playwright and writer of screenplays, television scripts and novel adaptations. Alan died in 2015.
Wikipedia:
Seymour was born in Fremantle, Western Australia. His father was killed in a wharf accident when Alan was nine, and his mother, a Cockney from London, died a few months later. After that he was brought up by his sister May and her husband, Alfred Chester Cruthers. He was educated at Perth Modern School, leaving at 15 after failing to complete the Junior Certificate. He found work as a radio announcer in a commercial radio station 6PM. During his two years there he wrote a number of short radio plays that were broadcast live. In 1945 he moved to Sydney, New South Wales, where he worked as an advertising copy-writer with 2UE.
He returned to Perth after the war where he worked as a free-lance writer for ABC Radio. Seymour became ABC Radio's film critic. He joined a commercial radio station 6KY as an announcer and copy-writer and after six months was offered an announcing post at the ABC. In 1949 he met Ron Baddeley, a RAAF veteran, and they were to become life partners. Wikipedia.
Selected Works
The One Day of the Year (1958)
Tomorrow's Child (1957) - TV play
The Lark (1959) - TV play
One Bright Day (1959) - TV play
The Life and Death of King Richard II (1960) - TV play
The Runner (1965) - TV play
References and Links
Stubbs, Roger et al. 2016, A Celebration of Contribution: Tales of the Courage, Commitment and Creativity of Modernians 1911-1963, WA Dept of Education: 243.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 20 October, 2017 and hosted at freotopia.org/authors/seymour2.html (it was last updated on 19 April, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.