Directed by
Marcelle Schmitz
Set
designer Lauren Ross
Performed
by WAAPA 3rd Year acting students Abbie-Lee Lewis, Emily Kennedy,
Renae Small, Travis Jeffery, Andrew Hearle, Arabella Mason and Mathew Cooper
Roundhouse
Theatre, WAAPA
15 – 23
June, 2012
 |
| Renae Small and Andrew Hearle |
Ray Lawler’s 1955 play, Summer of the Seventeenth
Doll, occupies a formidable place in the history of the Australian stage,
rather like Patrick White’s novels of the same vintage do in its literature. It
bears the weight of comparison to the gigantic American and British naturalist
dramas of the mid-20th century: Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and
Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiered the same year; John
Osborne’s Look back in Anger the year after.
It also suffered a bowdlerised, Americanised film
version in 1959, happy ending and all, that did its reputation no good at all.
For all these reasons, “The Doll” has long been a play
admired from a distance. In the WA of 2012, though, it offers something much
more immediate.
