Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
Hugely enjoyable revival of a play equal to Summer of the Seventeenth Doll gives a taste of what might have been
A hefty chunk of contemporary Australian playwriting can trace its narrative, thematic and structural lineage back to Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Ray Lawler’s play about imploding personal and national ideas of mateship, loyalty and family has been performed more than 1,000 times. It is regularly an assigned literary text in Australian high schools and universities, and it paved the way for a storytelling identity in its image: Australian naturalism, the mundane tragedies of life, the personal and the domestic writ epic. And it all started when the Doll won the prestigious Playwrights’ Advisory Board Competition Prize in 1955.
But it didn’t win alone. Lawler’s play actually tied with another one: The Torrents, by Oriel Gray. The Doll is a national classic; the Torrents had, until this year, only been performed professionally once: in Adelaide, in 1996. We can guess at all the reasons the industry chose to focus on the Doll and ignore The Torrents. Gray was a woman writer, first of all, a working mother in a conservative era, and a onetime member of the Communist party. She wrote about racism in country Australia, feminism and environmental concerns – all things the country was collectively trying to ignore. Gray left the theatre for television writing in the end. Game, set, and match to the male-dominated stage canon.
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