Australia banned this anti-fascist play in 1936 at the request of the Nazis. Ninety years on, it’s being staged again
A new production of Clifford Odets’ agitprop work Till the Day I Die is being remounted on the back of a truck in a Melbourne car park – rekindling its activist intent It might be difficult to imagine these days, but there was a time when theatre in Australia was so politically incendiary it could cause an international diplomatic scandal. A year after it premiered on Broadway in 1935, US…
In 1936, the Australian federal government, at the behest of the Nazi consul general, prohibited a politically charged play from being performed in the country. The play in question, Till the Day I Die, was written by US playwright Clifford Odets and centered around a communist Berliner who was arrested for distributing left-wing pamphlets. This particular production, inspired by Odets' more famous work Waiting for Lefty, was part of a wave of theatres in the 1930s that were aligned with communist ideologies.
The initial ban on Till the Day I Die in Australia was met with widespread public outrage, leading to a clandestine performance of the play on the back of a truck in Melbourne's Collingwood town hall. This truck, now a potent symbol of defiance and resistance, has inspired a new production of the play for the 2022 Melbourne fringe festival, organized by Mark Wilson and Katie Sfetkidis. The duo aims to pay tribute to the artists who dared to defy censorship and to reignite the spirit of activism in contemporary theatre.
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