Offending Australia's returned servicemen? Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year and censorship by rejection

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

    Abstract

    This chapter considers a case of theatre censorship in Australia in 1959, when Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year (1958) was rejected for performance at the 1960 inaugural Adelaide Festival by the Festival’s Executive Committee. The Festival is usually understood to have rejected the play as offensive to Australia’s returned servicemen. Discussions of the play usually relate it expressly or implicitly to censorship. Nonetheless, surveys of Australian theatre censorship do not mention it, presumably because it was not censored through application of the law.

    Set against a climate of official and unofficial censorship of theatre and other media in Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the chapter explores the multiple factors likely to have led the Festival to reject the play. It then analyses the differences between an early published text of the play and the version best known today. In doing so, it questions what the Festival rejected, arguing that the rejected text was not only potentially offensive to returned servicemen but also attacked the Australian middle-class establishment. The currently well-known version appears to show Seymour’s self-censorship between the play’s rejection and its first professional performance.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationThe Palgrave handbook of theatre censorship
    EditorsAnne Etienne, Graham Saunders
    Place of PublicationCham, Switzerland
    PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
    Pages535-552
    Number of pages18
    ISBN (Electronic)9783031672996
    ISBN (Print)9783031672989
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2025

    Keywords

    • Theatre censorship
    • The One Day of the Year
    • Alan Seymour
    • Censorship in Australia

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