THEATRE – Summer of the Seventeenth Doll – Playhouse – 3.5K

By Peter Maddern

It is 60 years since Ray Lawler’s ‘The Doll’ was first produced, then to universal acclaim, as it expressed an Australia that was seldom otherwise allowed on the stage as well as presenting a tragic tale of lives locked in a time warp that inevitably has to end.

As the play opens, Olive, Bubba and Pearl are waiting for Roo and Barney, two cane field workers, who have come to Melbourne each year in the off season to delight Olive and the now absent Nancy (who has gone off and got herself hitched a few months before.) This is the seventeenth such visit, each marked by Roo’s gift of a kewpie doll, but this time things are different.

Each of the seven member cast does an excellent job as Lawler grants them their moment in the stage sun. Lizzy Falkland’s Pearl early on is full of comic discomfort as the new fish in the aquarium and from one possessed of a different kind of sensibility to Olive about how to deal with the man she is being lined up for in Barney. Rory Walker as that Barney grows in his depiction of a middle aged catastrophe, sweet talker and cad, loyal friend and self-seeker, all in equal measure. Elena Carapetis’s Olive portrays that intense heart felt discomfort about a world that is being upended but who can’t see the wood from the cane.

The shortcoming in what is otherwise a terrifically enjoyable evening is Geordie Brookman’s attempts as director to modernise the setting of the play. To do that he and Melanie Selwood as Stage Manager, have created a living room decked out in non-descript curtains perhaps more appropriate for the performance of a piano soloist. In his program notes, Brookman writes of retaining ‘a gentle connection to the period’ yet the setting of the play is unmistakably Australia circa 1950-1980; a more modern world just couldn’t and doesn’t stand still as the script requires (even rural Queensland).

So, rather than his audience, when leaving, pondering what connections such human tragedy has to today (and there remain many), instead we ask ourselves whether the setting for that tragedy has sufficient credibility to get us to muse on those questions at all.

 

Kryztoff Rating 3.5K