Vale Ray Lawler (1921 – 2024)
The writer of Australia’s most celebrated play Summer of the 17h Doll passed away at the ripe old age of 103. Susan Mills from the Seaborn, Broughton & Walford Foundation looks back at his remarkable life.
Raymond Evenor Lawler AO OBE was born in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray on 23 May 1921. The second of eight children, his father was a council worker, and the family was decidedly working class. He left school at the age of 13 to work as a factory hand at an engineering foundry. In an interview with Stage Whispers in 2011, Ray Lawler recalled, “there was lots of daydreaming because it was so mechanical it left your mind free.”
As a young man, he developed a fascination with the theatre. “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, whatever it was that Williamsons were putting on,” Lawler said in the same interview.
This interest led him to amateur theatre, studying acting at nights, and taking voice lessons with Lorna Forbes, a long-time Shakespearean actress with the touring Allan Wilkie Shakespearean Company (particularly working on softening his broad Australian accent as, “that was the first thing you had to do if you wanted to be an actor.”)
When World War II broke out, his work at the factory increased when it was mobilised for war production, meaning many night shifts. “That drove me to writing more than acting.”
Ray Lawler’s first play to be performed, Hal’s Belles, produced by the Melbourne Repertory Club, opened on 29 September 1945 at the Melbourne Repertory Theatre in Middle Park. Hal’s Belles marked the professional stage debut of a 19-year-old Frank Thring Jr. It sought to answer the question of what would happen if a modern-day Henry VIII met his wives in the present day.
Hal’s Belles was a success and was transferred to Gertrude Johnson’s National Theatre in Eastern Hill. Lawler stayed with the National Theatre, acting in several of their drama productions. His own plays also continued to be produced there, including Brief Return and Storm in the Haven.
In 1948, Lawler landed his first paid professional theatre job, as assistant to Will Mahoney, who with wife Evie Hayes presented revues at the Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane. Lawler performed a medley of duties, from stage manager, to adapting sketches and writing lyrics, to acting as the straight man to Mahony’s comedy character. He stayed for a year, crediting this period of his life for meeting characters that would be the inspiration for the sugarcane cutters in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
Lawler returned to Melbourne and a job which combined office work and acting at the National Theatre. His play Cradle of Thunder, reported in the newspapers as being written in a public library, won the National Theatre Movement’s Commonwealth Jubilee Play Competition, and opened at the Princess Theatre in April 1952 as part of the National Theatre’s Festival of the Arts. He directed and played the part of Cully, a Welsh seaman.
It was in 1954 that Ray Lawler joined the Union Theatre Repertory Company (now the Melbourne Theatre Company) initially acting, then directing. The company had been founded by newly emigrated English stage manager and director John Sumner.
Early in 1955, the Playwrights’ Advisory Board advertised their fourth ‘stage play competition’ for Australian writers, with a winner’s prize of £100 donated by refrigerator manufacturer and philanthropist Sir Edward Hallstrom. The joint winners that year were Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Oriel Gray’s play The Torrents.
In 1955, John Sumner had joined the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust as the General Manager in Sydney, but he was granted a leave of absence to return to Melbourne to produce and direct Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
Sumner had already directed Ray Lawler as an actor in various Union Theatre productions. The Doll was the first Australian-authored play to be presented by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, founded in September 1954 to “provide a theatre of Australians, by Australians, for Australians.”
The Doll was first performed at the University of Melbourne’s Union Theatre on 28 November 1955. Ray Lawler played the role of Barney, a Queensland sugarcane cutter who returns every year to Melbourne with fellow cane cutter Roo (Noel Ferrier), to visit their barmaid girlfriends, Olive (June Jago) and Pearl (Roma Johnston). The setting, themes and accents were strikingly Australian and naturalistic.
“I always used to write a part for myself because I was very short, and I knew there wouldn’t be anyone else. So, while I never wrote a leading role for myself, it was always something decent,” Lawler told Stage Whispers.
The reviews for Summer of the Seventeenth Doll were very positive. Under the headline ‘Trust play is great success’, the Argus newspaper reported, “He has written a play so superbly true to Australian thought and the
Australian scene, that theatrical conventions disappear. ‘Barney’, ‘Roo’, ‘Pearl’ and ‘Emma’ are real people. We know their faces, their voices - we share their dreams, we understand their failures.”
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll opened in Sydney on 10 January 1956 at the Elizabethan Theatre in Newtown. It was summer and there was no air-conditioning, and the full house audiences sweltered, but again the positive responses showed how the play resonated with Australian audiences.
The cast was significantly changed, with Lloyd Berrell as Roo and Madge Ryan as Pearl, however Ray Lawler still played Barney and June Jago played Olive. The play then embarked on a 13-week country tour of NSW and Queensland before returning to Sydney.
As well as being a local success, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is considered the first Australian play to make an impact overseas. It opened in the UK, starting its tour in Nottingham on 8 April 1957, then playing Liverpool and Edinburgh, before opening in London on 30 April 1957. Much of the Sydney cast performed in this production.
The programme contained an insert, written by Ray Lawler, to explain Australian seasons, distances and climates, as well as definitions of a few key pieces of Australian slang. The Australian voice was well and truly on stage.