Lawlor’s characterisation of the four doomed characters is complex and their changing relationship nuanced, and the four actors fully meet the challenge. And from there, the dream of living a life of heightened intensity – more truly Olive’s creation – slowly dies. He covers for Roo’s failure to best the younger man by saying that Roo has injured his back. After the arrival of an edgy Barney and a more subdued Roo, Barney reveals to Olive that Roo has no money because he has left the cane fields after a fight with another younger and rival canecutter. Nancy, Barney’s long-time girlfriend, has married and Olive has “replaced” her with Pearl, (Grace Swadling), a pub co-worker, who views the situation in the Carlton household with suspicious eyes. The seventeenth year of the lay-off is different from the start. The title refers both to the kewpie doll Roo brings Olive each year and indicates that this – the seventeenth of their arrangement – is significantly and tragically different. It tells the story of two canecutters, Roo (Martin Grellis) and Barney (Harley Connor), who go to Melbourne for the five month lay-off season and spend their hard-earned money enjoying life with their two girlfriends, barmaids Olive (Jodine Muir) and Nancy. Besides uniformly excellent performances in a once confronting play, has this most recent revival anything to offer the present generation of Australian theatre goers?Īt the time, the play asks Australia to accept and work with an inevitable change from its self-image based on the bush legend to the far less romantic image of a modern urbanised country. There, need more wool.Summer of the Seventeenth Doll premiered in 1955 in Melbourne and within a decade had been staged across Australia, in London and in New York, and turned into a Hollywood film starring well-known actors, Ernest Borgnine and Anne Baxter. Don’t know whether I was madder at the boys or Cissie Lonigan. Said the boys picked me because I was developin’ early, and they liked to have me running up and down so they could watch me jiggle. But then somebody spoiled it for me- girl named Cissie Lonigan. I used to think because I was a decent runner, and whoever’s in the middle got to do a lot of chasin’ around. Needs a good back street… Ah, listen, there they go: ‘Charlie over the water, Charlie over the sea, Charlie broke the teapot, and blamed it on to me’… Funny, isn’t it? Things that you remember? Thirteen years of age, the boys were always pickin’ me to go out in the middle, ‘Charlie Over the Water’.

You must know it, Ol? Don’t suppose you boys do-no, more a city game. PEARL: Hear those kids? We used to play that.

Summer of 17th doll