Even before the production begins – and it takes some time to begin on opening night – you’ll notice something about Ralph Myers’s set design. Delicate curtains roll and swell about an upstage window open to the outside world – letting in the gentle breezes and not-so-gentle sounds of Surry Hills. At one point in the performance, the actors plough on with a scene despite a police or ambulance siren. (We can only hope a Sunday matinee audience is blessed with the sound of an ice cream truck at some point.)
It’s a lovely touch – and a reassuring sign that what we’re about to see is not a museum piece, but stunningly alive.
For five months every year for 16 years, men-of-the-land Barney (Dan Wyllie) and Roo (Steve Le Marquand) have left the Queensland cane fields – “flying down out of the sun” – to shack up with barmaids Nancy and Olive (Susie Porter) in a boarding house in Carlton. It’s their gruffly romantic alternative to humdrum suburban life – but this year, 1953, the 17th year, it’s different. Somewhere along the way, life happened: Nancy has gotten herself married, the respectable widow Pearl (Helen Thomson) has turned up in her place (in a respectable black dress), and the annual ritual isn’t as glamorous as it used to be.
Lawler’s ‘backyard realism’ bowled over audiences in 1955. In 2011, you realise that it still has the power to bowl over audiences for much the same simple reason: the sheer inexorable force of the drama that unfolds before us. The four leads bring out the remarkable journeys of their characters’ respective journeys, so we feel the drowning desperation in Dan Wyllie’s Barney, the mounting rage in Steve Le Marquand’s Roo, the internal conflicts of Helen Thomson’s Pearl and the painful and protracted disintegration of Susie Porter’s Olive. Yael Stone’s perky Bubba, TJ Power’s assured Johnnie Dowd and Robyn Nevin’s sardonic Emma – who leads a hilariously stern New Year’s Eve sing-song – round out an exceptional ensemble.
This production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll has ‘historic occasion’ written all over it: the first Great Australian Play directed by one of our Great Australian Directors for one of our Great Australian Theatres. (When the opening night audience stands up to applaud playwright Ray Lawler – looking awful sharp for a nonagenarian – there’s something deep and resounding to it that speaks for the whole country.)
But the fact that The Doll is an important Australian cultural document doesn’t for one moment get in the way of it being given a beautiful and robust production.
Newsletter
RSS feed
Twitter
Facebook
Google+
Spotify
Foursquare
iPhone App
Other Time Out cities
Magazine subscription
Print
Email
