100 Great Plays For Women by Lucy Kerbel

Author:Lucy Kerbel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

52. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler (b. 1921, Australia)

First performed: Union Theatre, Melbourne, 1955

Cast breakdown: 4f, 3m

Publisher: Samuel French, 2000

For the last sixteen summers, cane-cutters and best friends Roo and Barney have spent the ‘layoff season’ down south in Melbourne in the company of Olive and Nancy. Inseparable for the duration of the boys’ annual five-month stay, the four friends’ summers have become the stuff of legend, filled with a magical blend of fun, sunshine and romance. But on the seventeenth summer everything is different. Nancy has married and moved away and in her place is Pearl, a widow and workmate of Olive’s who isn’t entirely convinced by the set-up, nor her apparent role as Nancy’s replacement in Barney’s bed. Roo and Barney seem to have fallen out, there are problems with money, and Olive’s cantankerous mother Emma appears even more intent on dispensing doom and gloom than usual. Holed up in the house Olive and Emma share, the foursome can’t seem to get along, let alone have a good time, no matter how intently Olive tries to jolly the party along. As the sun beats down and tensions reach breaking point, there’s no way to avoid facing up to the fact that they have outgrown one another.

‘It was a queer experience to hear Australian place names and idiom being used in a big theatre after years of Bournemouth boarding house settings and brittle West End chatter.’ So commented the Sydney Morning Herald the day after Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s 1956 Sydney premiere. Credited with creating a turning point in Australian theatre, Ray Lawler’s three-act drama was revolutionary. Whereas Australian audiences’ experiences of theatregoing had previously consisted largely of imported British and American dramas, this new play showed Australian characters, speaking in Australian accents and in an Australian setting. It caused a sensation and the play, which had already moved to Sydney from its original home in Melbourne, went on to tour the country before receiving productions in the UK and USA. Now regarded as a classic of Australian theatre, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was in many ways at the vanguard of the Australian cultural explosion of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, an extraordinary period of artistic activity in which the film, theatre and television of the country redefined how Australia saw itself, and how the world saw Australia.

A play about getting older, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to defy time and the disillusionment that any attempt to do so will inevitably bring. All approaching their forties, but behaving as they did in their twenties, Olive, Roo and Barney have doggedly ignored the passing of the years, a foible which is now reaping horrible rewards. Roo, previously assured of his own virility, is still reeling from the shock of being outdone on the work field by a man nearly fifteen years his junior, while Barney, a former Lothario introduced to us by Lawler as a man

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