the playwright who changed the sound of Australian theatre

Ray Lawler, who died this week aged 103, was one of the artists behind the creation of Australia’s first non-commercial repertory theatre – the Union Repertory Theatre Company, now the Melbourne Theatre Company – and the author of its best-known play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

It is impossible to consider these two achievements separately. The success of The Doll was so pronounced that it consolidated the company’s position. The story of the play’s production is the story of the rise of the Union Theatre.

These two events mark the beginning of the structure, outlook and values ​​of Australian theatre today.

Australian coins ‘non-existent’

Lawler was born in Footscray in 1921. He left school at 13 to work in a factory. He took drama classes whenever he could and began writing plays during the war after being posted to night duty.

His first theatrical job was in the vaudeville circuit, where he played the role of a “straight man” to American comedian Will Mahoney. In 1953 he had a fateful encounter with John Sumner, founder of the Union Theatre, and the man who would run it for 35 years.

Sumner persuaded Lawler to try directing, and Sumner convinced Lawler to let the Union Repertory Theatre Company produce The Doll.

The choice of The Doll was not an easy one. In 1954 it shared first prize with Oriel Gray’s The Torrents in a playwriting competition. But that meant little. Australian plays often got literary recognition. The problem was getting them on stage.

Rehearsals continued to be problematic. In 1965, Niall Brennan, the Union Theatre’s stage manager, recalled:

At the time, theatre was an imported thing; Australian plays, in commercial terms, were virtually non-existent (…) The play was in Carlton, literally across the road from the theatre. It was very difficult for anyone to realise that we were so close to home. Was it a play about shearers and wombats, muttered one critic?

On 28 November 1955, Doll opened. Australian plays had already enjoyed success before this date, notably Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection (1912) and Sumner Locke-Elliot’s Rusty Bugles (1948). It is the breadth and depth of Doll’s impact that makes it such a landmark work, as well as the quality of its dialogue, characters and comic-tragic narrative.

An Australian classic

Lawler’s account of the deterioration and collapse of the unconventional relationship between two Queensland cane cutters and their off-season Melbourne-based lovers was both an attack on the wowserism of the era and a clear-eyed dissection of the values ​​we would today call masculinist.

Unlike other pieces from the 1950s, it retains all its strength and appeal. It is one of the few that can rightly be called an Australian classic.

Supported by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (predecessor to Creative Australia), the doll toured nationally, with Lawler playing the role of Barney.

With the help of Lawrence Olivier, the production then transferred to London’s New Theatre, where it had a similarly seismic impact on British audiences, running for over eight months and winning the Evening Standard Award for Best New Play.

Ken Tynan, the rising star of theatre criticism, wrote of Lawler’s “respect for ordinary people”, marvelling at his ability to portray working-class characters who were neither secondary nor the butt of class humour. It was not until John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney that English theatre achieved a similar feat.

In 1959, The Doll was adapted for film by Hecht Hill Lancaster. In 1996, it was adapted into a chamber opera by Richard Mills.

A unique event

Lawler had a long career in theatre, but never repeated the triumph of The Doll. In 1957 he left Australia to live in Denmark, Britain and Ireland. Returning in 1975, he joined Sumner at the Melbourne Theatre Company until their retirement in 1987.

In 1975 and 1976, Lawler wrote two prequels, Kid’s Stakes and Other Times. Together, they form The Doll trilogy, which complements other trilogies in the Australian repertoire such as Peter Kenna’s Cassidy Album (1978), Janis Balodis’s The Ghosts Trilogy (1997) and Jack Davis’s The First Born Trilogy (1988).

In retrospect, two things can be said about the doll’s success.

First, it is easy to take its influence for granted and fall into systematic depreciation, as the theatre critic Harry Kippax did when he complained about the rush of plays he called “Doll clones”. Playwrights are not responsible for the drama they inspire, only for the work they create. Doll remains a singular event for Australian theatre, and for Australian culture in general, because it has distanced itself from its British colonial origins.

Second, although many Australians have heard of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and a good proportion have seen it, the play remains largely unperformed overseas. Here, the play’s strengths may work against it. The authenticity of language and character that appealed to audiences in the 1950s and remains impressive today is difficult for non-Australian actors to replicate.

The strength and challenge of The Doll is that it resists globalised interpretation: it remains above all and stubbornly an Australian piece.

Perhaps the last word can be given to Brennan about the opening night audience:

None of us could understand. The curse (that had struck the Australian theatre) had just disappeared! They applauded the curtain of the hall as it rose, and they applauded the scenery. They applauded all the actors as they entered, and the roars that greeted Ray himself were enormous. When the curtain fell at the end, the theatre almost shook.