I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about the late Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and it’s been fascinating reading the obits for Lawler coming from big theatre companies, journos and the like. It was nice to see Guy Rundle take the thought a bit further than “Vale Ray Lawler”.
I’m a theatremaker; you could probably say my mates and I are more like the “German shrieking” types mentioned in Guy’s article, without the Blanchett budget. Last December we got stuck into workshopping The Doll. We wanted to uncover what the hell we were supposed to do with this thing, and why it endures.
We’ve all had some personal experience with it, mostly through drama school, whether via the audition process (my first interaction was an audition booklet for the National Institute of Dramatic Art) or scene studies. We’ve all seen it a few times, ranging from amateur to mainstage.
Look, it’s kind of always the same, isn’t it? Someone wheels out the old piano, a ‘50s radio on the mantlepiece, Barney wears a Hawaiian shirt, a few floral dresses are thrown in for good measure. Text unchanged and the beats are hit. Watching it feels like an obligation — like watching The Castle, but two and a half hours long and not as fun.
During this workshop, we came up with two questions we wanted to address. What do we do with the Australian classic? And what does it mean to us as theatremakers in 2024?
We tried all sorts of things. We played it off the page, we rewrote the text to be more contemporary, we added Neighbours title sequences and played it out as a soapie, we toyed with the idea of doing an Ivo van Hove strip-down. We added our personal stories, used the story events as a Wiggles-esque group song, knuckled into the Australia-nah and ramped up the crikeycore. It was a blast, but we learned that the play is t-i-g-h-t.
What worked best for us was presenting our own relationships to the work and how we are still living in the shadow of this play. We’re putting on our version, This is the dust we’re in, for the Melbourne Fringe Festival (named for the line the distraught Roo bellows in the final scene).
Guy’s article calls for an Australian theatre canon. Although the mentioned writers deserve the praise, I don’t think the answer is restaging Australian classics. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a vicious breakneck version of The Removalists, but I’m unsure it works as a contemporary piece. So, what? Do we then present it as a period piece? I dunno… I’ve seen it a few times now and it feels like a recent relic, like finding a 40-year-old VB can when cleaning out your parent’s garage. Sure, there’s a novelty, but I’m not going to drink it.
I’m always asking: why this? Why now in Australia? Particularly when I look at our main- and off-stages. Do I need to see it again? Where’s the risk?
Resistance to change and the refusal to move on or grow up are major themes in The Doll. More than anything, this feels deeply Aussie. Australia loves looking back, but the theatre should be a place where we spend more time in the now.
