FAREWELL TO STAGE AND SCREEN PIONEER LES DAYMAN
1933–2023
Actor, director and honorary MEAA Equity member Les Dayman, who died at the age of 90 late last year, was a sports-mad young man, whose father wanted him to become an accountant, yet went on to have an illustrious stage and screen career spanning 50 years.
After finishing high school, Les was ensconced in the public service when a colleague introduced him to the local amateur theatre scene. In the 1950s there were no professional theatre companies in Adelaide and Les had no aspirations to make acting his career, but he soon got the bug for performing and never looked back. With early roles including Biff in Death of a Salesman and productions of The Winter’s Tale, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Crucible, to name a few, it wasn’t long before Les was being hailed in the press as South Australia’s leading stage actor. In 1961 he directed his first play, an amateur production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party for Adelaide Theatre Group. One reviewer stated: Les “managed to evoke startling heights from his players in addition to professionally dynamic production values”.
Still in Adelaide, Les appeared on radio and acted in a couple of TV plays for the ABC whilst continuing in theatre, but everything changed in 1966 when he was approached by Melbourne-based Crawford Productions to join the cast of their popular police drama, Homicide. Les had already appeared in the series in a guest role (playing a truck driver who murders his wife) when a couple of weeks later he was signed to play Detective Bill Hudson, a role he continued playing until 1968. The role made Les a household name. After visiting the Homicide set and meeting Les’s co-star Leonard Teale, Les’s father soon changed his tune and accepted Les’s life as an actor.
By the end of 1968 Les and his family were back in Adelaide after Les accepted an offer to take over from John Tasker as Artistic Director of the newly established South Australian Theatre Company. Les remained as Artistic Director until the end of 1969. The first play he directed in his new role was the Australian play Burke’s Company about the Burke and Wills expedition.
For the next 12 years Les acted in or directed dozens of plays, touring all over South Australia as well as interstate. These ranged from Shakespeare and the classics to new Australian plays, comedies and musicals. Plays he directed include George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and Simon Gray’s Butley.
Displaying great versatility as an actor he appeared in Loot by Joe Orton, Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King, Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, David Williamson’s Jugglers Three and The Department, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Henry IV parts 1 + 2 and Hamlet, Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Annie Get Your Gun, Jack Hibberd’s The Les Darcy Show and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. For the Melbourne Theatre Company he played in John Whiting’s The Devils and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw.
In 1981 Les went to Sydney with a production of Ron Blair’s comedy Last Day in Woolloomooloo and decided to make a home there. Joining the books of ICS actors’ agency, his career continued to flourish.
His television work includes mini-series: The Last Outlaw, I Can Jump Puddles, Sara Dane, and Bodyline in which he played cricketer Bert Oldfield. With his love of cricket, Les described this role as one of the best acting jobs he’d ever had — minimal dialogue, maximum exposure. Guest roles in series such as Division 4, Cop Shop, Holiday Island, Bellamy, Learned Friends, Possession, Special Squad, Rafferty’s Rules and a variety of roles in A Country Practice kept him busy. Longer-running roles saw him as inmate Geoff McCrae in Prisoner — popular in the UK and Scandinavia — in which he was reunited with Elspeth Ballantyne, a colleague from his early Adelaide theatre days and whose father, Colin Ballantyne, was highly influential when Les was starting out. He also appeared as the ruthless businessman Roger Carlyle in Sons & Daughters which brought him fans from the UK and Belgium. Another long-running role came in 1988 when he was cast as Sergeant George Sullivan, a recovering alcoholic, opposite Cecily Polson as Martha, in E Street. Les and Cecily had worked together previously in a production of Death of a Salesman directed by George Ogilvie. In that production Les played Charley in a cast that also included Warren Mitchell, Mel Gibson, Peter Gwynne and Judi Farr. E Street was a very happy time for Les and he stayed with the show until it ended in 1993. His TV work post-E Street includes Blue Murder as Commissioner Avery, Big Sky, Water Rats, Stingers, Blue Heelers and All Saints. TV movies include The Last Frontier, Cate Shortland’s The Silence and Roger Hodgman’s Stepfather of the Bride.
Having made his feature film debut as Riley in Tom Jeffrey’s Weekend of Shadows, Les’s other film work includes Peter Weir’s Gallipoli, Esben Storm’s With Prejudice and Stanley (making a cameo appearance as a cop alongside Leonard Teale in a nod to their Homicide characters), Gillian Armstrong’s Oscar and Lucinda, Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, In the Winter Dark, Molly, Footy Legends and director Beth Armstrong’s award-winning short film Cheek to Cheek.
Despite a long list of screen credits, which continued into his 70s, Les’s first love was the theatre — it gave him a buzz. And when he could he’d obsessively watch the onstage action from the wings.
Highlights of his later work in theatre include Terence Clarke’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day, As You Like It for John Bell at Nimrod, Honey Spot by Jack Davis, which dealt with Indigenous issues and toured Australia, the US and Canada and A Fortunate Life alongside Syd Brisbane for director Brian Debnam.
Another theatrical highlight was directing a 1986 touring production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire with Helen Morse as Blanche and Les’s wife, Rosalind Woolf, also in the cast. It was a happy company and audiences flocked to see the show. Helen and Les had first worked alongside one another as actors in Chekhov’s The Seagull in 1970 for the Adelaide Festival, with Les playing Trigorin.
As he entered his 60s, Les played the noble and brave Giles Corey in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible directed by Richard Wherrett. It was to be his final stage role and would prove to be a fitting bookend to a remarkable career in the theatre that began in Miller’s Death of a Salesman all those years ago.
When it came to his career, Les believed he was one of the lucky ones. He was a pioneer of Australian television drama and professional theatre in South Australia who was just doing what he loved and journeying along a path that was there to follow. He likened working as an actor to that of an athlete gearing up; doing the mental and physical preparation required. He treasured the approach to a performance almost as much as the actual performance and his method of dealing with daunting expectation was to just get out there and enjoy it.
Obituary by Nigel Giles
