Classic plays often accrue unhelpful or misleading associations that can weigh them down in the public imagination. Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a case in point: arguably the great Australian play, it’s justifiably credited with having changed theatre in Australia forever by presenting a vision of authentic working-class life on stage. So many claims have carbuncled themselves on to the work since its debut in 1955 that it can be difficult to see it as anything but a museum piece, worthy and impossibly dated.
But when the St Kilda-based theatre company Red Stitch programmed its forthcoming revival of Lawler’s play and the two others that make up the Doll Trilogy – Kid Stakes and Other Times – they found a series of works that crackled with life and resonance.
“Historically, there’s been a lot of grandiose language about [these plays] being about the transformation of a nati
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