Daybreak (play)

Daybreak is a 1938 Australian play by Catherine Shepherd.^[2][3]

It won the Melbourne National Theatre Movement's Australia-wide three-act play competition, and is on the Playwrights' Advisory Board's list of recommended plays.^[4]

The play was published in 1942. It was one of the most successful plays to come from a Tasmanian author.^[5][6]

Leslie Rees wrote of the play in his history of Australian drama, calling it "Catherine Shepherd's most considerable "Australian" drama... Perhaps Daybreak lacks the scope of a "full-length" play and has a certain starchiness, along with its fine feeling, but is a worthy conception, a criticism of smug inflexible authority rather than of deliberate tyranny."^[7]

One critic felt it was "heavily indebted" to The Barretts of Wimpole Street.^[8]

The play was given a reading in 1937 and performed in Hobart in 1938.^[9]

The play was adapted into a 60 minute version for radio in 1938 (as part of the ABC's Australian Radio Drama Week^[10]), 1939, 1940,^[11] 1944 (when it was the first play broadcast by the ABC from Newcastle^[12]) 1948 and 1951.^[13]

The 1938 radio production was the first time the work was produced professionally. There had been a reading in 1937.^[14]

In 1830 colonial Hobart, Simon Martel is the father of two girls, Caroline and Jeanne. Simon is a harsh man devoted to religion, while Jeanne is more idealistic. Jeanne falls in love with an Englishman called Francis, who is determined to build a utopia with some convicts. Simon arranges for Francis to be expelled from Van Dieman's Land. Jeanne persuades Francis to let her run away with him. There is a subplot about two servants of Simon, Phoebe and Rufus Bellamy, falling in love and asking Simon for permission to get their ticket of leave, but Simon refuses, over Jeanne's objections, insisting that convicts are to be punished.

Jeanne leaves with Francis but we find out later it was a disaster. The ship they were meant to flee on was shipwrecked, there were clashes with troops in which Francis was mortally wounded. Simon is killed by Bellamy, driven mad by Simon's punishments. This is witnessed by Caroline. Jeanne successfully persuades Caroline to say she saw nothing, so Bellamy will not be executed.^[15]

Reviewing a 1942 published edition of the play the Sydney Morning Herald called it "outstanding... every word fits the particular character, and every word tells-while the action, too, is a unity and spares the theatrical tricks and sentimental appeals."^[16]

Reviewing a 1939 production at the Independent Theatre the Sydney Morning Herald said "The dramatic thread is not always taut enough to sustain suspense or build up a really gripping climax, but this in no way destroys the play, but it takes from it just that urgency and note of tragedy which would have lifted it on to a higher level of dramatic achievement."^[17]

Reviewing a 1939 radio production Wireless Weekly said "The construction of the play is slightly rambling, and until it is well under way one is not quite certain of the sympathies of its central character. ... But Miss Shepherd is a playwright with ideas, and for that much shall be forgiven her...The story has plenty of light and shade. It has a little humor, a little horror, and plenty of emotion. Yet it carries conviction."^[18]