how Ray Lawler’s trilogy offers a strikingly bold vision for our future
- Written by Andrew Starner, Lecturer in Drama, Australian Catholic University
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a 1955 play by Ray Lawler is as canonical an Australian play as you can get. On its premiere, it was credited with ushering a new era of assuredness in Australian theatre: telling Australian stories, with Australian accents.
Barney and Roo work as cane cutters for seven months of the year. In the off-season, they travel to Melbourne to spend time with working class women Olive and Nancy.
This summer, in the 17th iteration of the layoff, Nancy has unexpectedly entered into a conventional marriage. This causes the remaining characters to reconsider their own roles in this unique ménage à quatre.
Daringly, Lawler figured these layoffs as periods of sustained pleasure and emotional fulfilment for the men, while also highlighting Nancy and Olive’s agency and independence in their paradoxically proto-feminist act of electing to be their layoff gals.
Read more: Vale Ray Lawler: the playwright who changed the sound of Australian theatre
17 dolls and 11 hours
The “doll” of the title does not refer to the women, but to a novelty item first purchased at the Luna Park fair ground. Each year, as a sign of his renewed commitment, Roo bestows one on Olive. The uncanny kewpie dolls eventually festoon the living room of their shared boarding house, more characters in the on-again, off-again performance of domesticity.
In the mid 1970s, Lawler wrote two additional plays – prequels to the Doll, crafting a trilogy of stories set over 17 years: Kid Stakes, set in the first summer of their relationships, and Other Times, set at the conclusion of the second world war.
The Doll remains the most popular of the three plays, and is typically staged alone. The trilogy of works have not been staged together since 1985, but now Red Stitch Theatre is playing them in repertory, including a marathon Saturday session that lasts nearly 11 hours (with breaks).
The fact that the plays were not written in chronological order, and the two ealier-set plays came 20 years later, underscores Lawler’s interest in memory, how we sustain ideas over time and how we contend with loss and change.
The same quartet of performers play the characters as they progress through the cycle, a unique acting challenge. Here Ngaire Dawn Fair, playing Olive, and Emily Godard, playing Nancy (and, in the final part, Pearl), do an especially fine job of ageing before the audience’s eyes.
The revival is well-plotted, lavishly acted, beautifully lit and features stunning costumes.
I had the experience of seeing the three shows run together on a sunny late summer day in Melbourne, where the audience spilled out onto a lawn and garden surrounding the theatre, almost as if we were stepping into the Carlton back garden the characters enter when they leave the stage.
Spending that length of time together with other spectators creates a strong feeling of camaderie and led to good-natured jokes at times about how hard we, the audience, were working, and whether or not we would be able to bear up.
The nature of work
Across the three works, Melbourne itself is a central character: its pubs, restaurants, parks and beaches. The city serves as a resource that sustains the interior lives of the characters, albeit without providing for their material needs (at least in Roo and Barney’s instance).
Instead, the characters in the play rely on an infusion of outside capital – eerily prescient from the perspective of our era of drastic cuts to arts funding. And so the central element of a play comes into view: its relationship to work.
Barney and Roo are itinerants, performing the role of husband or suitor but without also adopting that of provider.
The work that the men do in the cane fields rhymes with the experience of jobbing actors or musicians, who can’t rely on steady employment. Actors know firsthand the experience of unreliable, precarious work and the havoc it wrecks on relationships.
And yet, the characters in the Doll have somehow found a way to build enduring connections and find meaning and satisfaction in a world that is always subject to change.
The trilogy invites us to think not just about our relationship to the period it depicts from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s, but about temporality and timescapes more generally.
By the time we reach the ultimate play, the violence and raw emotions it showcases are all the more striking thanks to the time we’ve spent with the characters.
The audience viscerally shares in the sense of brokenness and interruption Nancy’s departure has caused, and keenly feel the disillusionment and uncertainty of the characters left behind.
If anything, the 70 years that have passed since Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’s first performance should serve as a powerful vindication of the optimism felt by the younger characters in the play.
But Australia’s sustained postwar economic miracle and its growing artistic and cultural legacy aside, The Doll Trilogy at Red Stitch comes at an ambiguous and fearful time. Climate change threatens the health of the cane fields that Roo and Barney rely on, and rapid technological advances threaten to put us all out of work.
Lawler’s plays, by reordering the social contract – especially around marriage and work – suggests that the old model might not be worth mourning much. In that respect, these old classics offer a strikingly bold vision for the future.
The Doll Trilogy is at Red Stitch, Melbourne, until April 11.
Authors: Andrew Starner, Lecturer in Drama, Australian Catholic University
