AustLit

Ray Lawler explains the circumstances in which he decided to create the Doll Trilogy. He also provides background information on canecutting, boarding houses and kewpie dolls.

Roo and Barney are Queensland canecutters who have spent the off-season in Melbourne with their girlfriends for sixteen years. Each summer, Barney ritualistically presents his girl Olive, a barmaid, with a kewpie doll. But the seventeenth summer is different; time has begun to take its toll. The themes of faded dreams, idealism, disillusionment, and the determination to live bring out a quintessential Australian boisterous flavour while portraying what happens when the values of the outback hero conflict with urban domesticity.

'On December 29, 1170, a "turbulent priest" named Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was martyred in his own cathedral. For nearly three-and-a-half centuries his tomb behind the High Altar was the goal of countless pilgrims (including of course Chaucer's), seeking the Saint's blessing and hoping for cures. Then came the Reformation; and Thomas' coffin with the vast treasure which pilgrims had helped around it disappeared. In A Breach In The Wall, tonight's play, the Australian playwright Ray Lawler suggests what might be the consequences if the Saint's body were ever to come to light again.

'A Breach In The Wall is set some time in the near future. The parish church of the Kentish village of Valham is undergoing long-overdue restoration - restoration largely made possible by the fund-raising efforts of the able and radical young incumbent, Lewis Patterson. A walled-in chamber is discovered and within it is a coffin sealed with the crest of Becket. The excitement which follows is used by Mr Lawler to examine the state of the Churches, and Faith itself, today. Would the discovery help to breach the wall between the Anglican and Roman Churches? If the body again became an object of pilgrimage, would it cause an embarrassing revival of "superstition"?'

Source: Radio Times, 23 March 1967.

'The most famous Australian play and one of the best loved, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a tragicomic story of Roo and Barney, two Queensland sugar-cane cutters who go to Melbourne every year during the 'layoff' to live it up with their barmaid girl friends. The title refers to kewpie dolls, tawdry fairground souvenirs, that they brings as gifts and come, in some readings of the play, to represent adolescent dreams in which the characters seem to be permanently trapped. The play tells the story in traditional well-made, realistic form, with effective curtains and an obligatory scene. Its principal appeal – and that of two later plays with which it forms The Doll Trilogy – is the freshness and emotional warmth, even sentimentality, with which it deals with simple virtues of innocence and youthful energy that lie at the heart of the Australian bush legend.

'Ray Lawler’s play confronts that legend with the harsh new reality of modern urban Australia. The 17th year of the canecutters’ arrangement is different. There has been a fight on the canefields and Roo, the tough, heroic, bushman, has arrived with his ego battered and without money. Barney’s girl friend Nancy has left to get married and is replaced by Pearl, who is suspicious of the whole set-up and hopes to trap Barney into marriage. The play charts the inevitable failure of the dream of the layoff, the end of the men’s supremacy as bush heroes and, most poignantly, the betrayal of the idealistic self-sacrifice made by Roo’s girl friend Olive – the most interesting character – to keep the whole thing going. The city emerges victorious, but the emotional tone of the play vindicates the fallen bushman.'

Source: McCallum, John. 'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.' Companion to Theatre in Australia. Ed. Philip Parson and Victoria Chance. Sydney: Currency Press , 1997: 564-656.