Gallipoli Plays All Over Australasia

Clem Gorman was the catalyst for Australia’s most famous anti-war play The One Day of the Year. He is a nephew of Alan Seymour who died last month. He reflects on the strengths of war drama and gives an overview on what is on stage in the lead up to the centenary of Anzac Day.

2015 is the year of the Gallipoli play. They range from major tours of established plays to new works created by local community theatre groups.  Most are being staged leading  up to April 25.

The daddy of them all must be Hit Productions’ nationwide tour of Alan Seymour’s seminal and iconic work, The One Day of the Year. Its core theme is the time-honoured struggle between father and son, the former an ex-soldier who believes in the Aussie Diggers and all that they represent (conveniently ignoring the booze and bathos that used to characterize Anzac Day), the latter a university student  rebelling against the celebration of war. An older character, Whacka, fought in the first war, while the father fought in the second.

Sadly, Alan Seymour died on the 23^rd of March, of Alzheimers. I was his  Enduring Guardian.

Seymour was my uncle, and he used me as the model for the son. He also inspired me to write my own antiwar play, A Manual of Trench Warfare.

Seymour was close to his sister and my father, and he watched with interest the conflict of values between myself, as a leftwing student, president of the university Labor Club, and my conservative Dad. As an example of the age-old father-son conflict it intrigued him, and he decided to write about it.

Hit Productions kindly invited me to speak from the stage about Alan and the play after its performance at the Riverside in Parramatta on Friday March 27.

Another offering is the Ensemble Theatre’s The Anzac Project, two one-act plays by Geoffrey Atherden and Vanessa Bates.

Atherden’s Dear Mum and Dad revolves around a long-forgotten letter and an old secret revealed.  Bates’s Light Begins to Fade follows a roomful of TV writers trying to adapt the Gallipoli story for a modern audience. Director Mark Kilmurry.

Black Diggers, a play by Tom Wright about Aboriginal Australians who fought for their country, is on national tour.  It tells the story of how Aboriginal men stepped up to enlist despite being   shunned and downtrodden in their own country – and in fact banned by their own government from serving in the military.

At the Genesian Theatre in Sydney is a play about Simpson and his Donkey.

The Queensland Theatre Company stages Brisbane, by Matthew Ryan. Described as a “life-affirming coming-of-age tale” about a 14 year old Brisbane lad in World War Two who befriends an American soldier. , This play depicts the tension and anxiety of a time when Australia was threatened with invasion.  

In Gosford, the Laycock Street Theatre is presenting Flak, a one man show by actor/writer Michael Veitch about the airmen who flew in World War 11 – their bravery, their lives, and their deaths.

New Zealand is not left out of the picture. The Hawera Repertory Society is staging Anzac, by John Broughton. The play takes us through the short history of New Zealand’s involvement in the war, starting from the initial gung-ho enthusiasm and ending with cynicism and heartbreak, tempered with a continuing steely resolve to see the struggler through.

The Fortune Theatre in Dunedin is presenting a play by Philip Braithwaite about his great uncle, Jack Braithwaite, who fought in World War 1.

Campbell Smith has written Soldier’s Song, about a soldier who was executed for desertion in the First World War, showing at the Wellington Repertory.

In Queensland, Beenleigh Theatre Group is presenting The First – An Anzac Tribute to the 1st AIF. Created in partnership with the Beenleigh RSL, this is a commemorative tribute play to the soldiers of the 1^st AIF as they fought in Gallipoli and on the Western Front.

When to these are added the various film and television projects progressively being released, it is fair to call this the year of Gallipoli – or the other war. One may wonder how live plays will compete with war movies which have the advantage of realistic-looking action on a wide screen, enveloping the audience. But then, plays deal in thought, language, ideas.

A great war play is hard to write because the writer has to focus in on just a few people, leaving the shell blasts, the bayonet charges, and the burning villages to an audience’s imagination.  Yet, surely, this is an advantage because an audience can see theeffects of the battle upon real, vulnerable human beings – this is the challenge: to see, in small focus, what war really does, not just to villages, fields and tanks, but to frightened human beings, each encased in his or her all-too-frail body.  A war play is like a zoom, closing in on the “little battles” of just a few men whose uniforms might as well be made of paper.

My own play, Gallipoli: A Manual of Trench Warfare, produced by Jally Entertainment,will be touring regional venues and some schools in the period leading up to Anzac Day.  It is on stage at the Penrith Panthers from April 19 until 24.

Trench has had a long and roller coaster career. I wrote it in 1977 while living in London, and most of my research was conducted in the library at Australia House in the Strand. But its origin was a kind of strange vision I had, years before, while sitting in an apartment in Potts Point, when I suddenly saw two men, stripped to the waist, dancing in a trench while a battle raged around them. I had long had a desire to emulate my uncle and write an antiwar play, and I knew then that it was time to do something with this irritating waking vision.

The first production, in 1979, was by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, and they obtained a grant for me to work with the director, Colin George, on the editing process.

This began a series of edits, each tightening and shortening the script, ending with the 2013 workshop by Jally, where Arne Neeme and I produced the final version – only 36 years later. Now the theme - how to retain one’s essential humanity in the midst of that most inhuman of humanity’s activities, war – is front and centre.

Perhaps, in some perfect future, there will be no war.  Men will no longer be contained in trenches, challenged by their fear and the stench of their own excrement, trying to kill men they do not know. I for one will be happy if that time comes, and my play, and all the plays about Gallipoli or any other war, will disappear from human consciousness. Until then, we need theses plays, to remind of what must never happen again. 

Originally published in the March / April 2015 edition of Stage Whispers.