Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

On Friday night, TraderVic and I and our HTC friends went to see an iconic Australian play: "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll". As usual, for an amateur theatre company the sets and acting were superb!

The play is considered to be a very important one as you can see from these notes below:

"Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a pioneering Australian play written by Ray Lawler and first performed at the Union Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, on 28 November 1955. The play is almost unanimously considered by scholars of literature to be the most historically significant in Australian theatre history, openly and authentically portraying distinctly Australian life and characters. It was one of the first truly naturalistic "Australian" theatre productions."

The Plot:

The play is set in Australia, in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton and it details the events of the summer of 1953, in the lives of six central characters. The structure of the play is such that the nature of these characters and their situation and history is not revealed immediately, but rather gradually established as the story unfolds. By the end, the story and all its facets have been indirectly explained.

The summer that the story spans marks the seventeenth year of an annual tradition in the lives of the characters, wherein two masculine sugarcane cutters, Arthur "Barney" Ibbot and Reuben "Roo" Webber, travel south to Melbourne for five months of frivolity and celebration with two city women, Olive Leech and Nancy (bringing with them as a gift a kewpie doll, hence the name). One of the women, Nancy, has apparently gotten married just months ago, and she is not present in the play, so in her place Olive has invited Pearl Cunningham to partake in the tradition. The other women present in the play are Kathie "Bubba" Ryan, a 22-year old girl who has been coveting Olive and Nancy's lifestyle from her neighbouring house almost all her life, and Emma Leech, Olive's cynical, irritable but wise mother.

As the play progresses, it becomes obvious that, for many collective reasons, this summer is different to others; it is full of tensions, strains to recreate lost youth and, from what is said of previous years, not a fraction of the fun that others have been. Steadily things become worse; Roo is revealed to be broke and unemployed, disillusioned with his age and weaknesses, while relations between him and Barney are in doubt, due to a recent question of loyalty. The situation is agitated in part by Pearl's uptight indignation and refusal to accept the lifestyle she is being presented with as "proper" or "decent".

The play ends with a bitter fight between Olive and Roo after he proposes marriage to her and she is affronted, threatened by the prospect of any lifestyle other than the one to which she is accustomed. In the final scene, the two men leave together, the summer prematurely ended and the characters' futures uncertain.

The Dolls referred to in the title are Kewpie dolls which are little dolls with lace and frills on a stick:

I hope that you have enjoyed this play visit with me.  The next and last play for the year is one of my favourites -  Arsenic and Old Lace - but I am going to have to wait until December for to see it.

Off for my walk with DF, Marie, shortly and then I plan to stitch, stitch, stitch the day away for IHSW.

hugs,