Ray Lawler’s drama became an international hit in the 50s, playing London, New York and eventually the silver screen. Now it’s being restaged as part of the ‘Doll trilogy’ in Melbourne – and it remains a classic
Classic plays often accrue unhelpful or misleading associations that can weigh them down in the public imagination. Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a case in point: arguably the great Australian play, it’s justifiably credited with having changed theatre in Australia forever by presenting a vision of authentic working-class life on stage. So many claims have carbuncled themselves on to the work since its debut in 1955 that it can be difficult to see it as anything but a museum piece, worthy and impossibly dated.
But when the St Kilda-based theatre company Red Stitch programmed its forthcoming revival of Lawler’s play and the two others that make up the Doll Trilogy – Kid Stakes and Other Times – they found a series of works that crackled with life and resonance.
“Historically, there’s been a lot of grandiose language about [these plays] being about the transformation of a nation,” says the director, Ella Caldwell. “It’s not actually about that. It’s about this specific family in a single lounge room, going through their big and little struggles in a specific time in Australia’s history.”