By Peter Dewar
Playwright Ray Lawler died in July this year aged 103. The celebrated writer, actor, director and producer is best remembered for his ground-breaking Australian play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Its success reassured an emerging sunburnt nation that their unique storytelling was of artistic worth.
In 1921, Lawler was born in a booming Footscray and attended the Footscray State School in Geelong Road. The industrial hub was subsequently ravaged during the next decade by the Great Depression, and to help support his family, Lawler left school aged 13, to work in the noise, heat and earthy language of a local factory.
However, the teen’s future lay in a more imaginative world. ‘God knows how I got interested in theatre, because I was one of eight kids and we had no theatre in the family. I started to go on my own to see plays …,’ explained Lawler in his 90s, during an interview with Stage Whisperers magazine.
While working, Lawler took acting classes whenever possible, eventually getting his start on the vaudeville circuit playing a straight-man to an American comedian.
Lawler often worked night shifts during the Second World War as factories operated to the demands of wartime. ‘That drove me to writing more than acting …,’ said Lawler. To start, he wrote radio scripts, but theatre had a firm grip on the young talent’s heart. Lawler wrote a number of plays and his eighth, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, told the story of two Queensland cane-cutters and their 17th seasonal holiday with two barmaids in Melbourne, and shared first place in a playwrights competition.
‘The Doll’, as it became known, was a compelling tale in Aussie vernacular about the lives of ‘ordinary’ people. Such a quintessentially Australian play was a rarity in the days of visiting English and American productions when local actors would be urged to drop their accent.
Lawler directed Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and played the leading role as Barney when the play opened at the Union Theatre Repertory, which later became the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC).
The 1955 production was a ‘wild success’ and toured nationally making its way to London’s West End in 1957 where it won the Evening Standard award for best new play. While American audiences were challenged by Australian parlance when the production played at New York’s Broadway, Hollywood producers obtained the rights to the script and it was made into a movie in 1959.
Lawler and actress Jacklyn Kelleher married in 1956 before leaving Australian shores to tour with the play. The couple had two sons and a daughter and returned in 1975 to live in Elwood.
Among Lawler’s numerous subsequent works were two prequels: Kid Stakes and Other Times were written in the 1970s and traced the lives of the original characters. The ‘Doll Trilogy’ combined the earlier script with the two sequels.
Those living in Melbourne’s west could be forgiven for understanding Ray Lawler’s life as merely a local-boy-makes-good story — in truth, it is much more. After his recent passing, MTC commented on social media: ‘Lawler’s 1955 play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was a turning point in Australian theatre history …’.
