Ray Lawler

Playwright

• Born: May 23, 1921
• Place of Birth: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
• Died: July 24, 2024
• Place of Death: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Factory worker turned actor-playwright Ray Lawler became a pioneering figure in Australian theater. His Doll Trilogy met with unprecedented international acclaim and represented a watershed moment in Australian theater, which had been dominated by British and American work to that point.

Background

Raymond “Ray” Evenor Lawler was born on May 23, 1921, in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria. One of eight siblings born to a lower-middle-class Australian family, Lawler left school to work in a factory at age thirteen.

Lawler was always interested in the theater, though, and he took acting lessons and worked at the Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane during the late 1940s. There, he became the personal assistant of theater manager and former vaudeville performer Will Mahoney. In that capacity, he often performed in pantomimes or walk-on roles as a straight man for the comics.

Lawler also began writing his own pieces during this time. By age twenty-three, Lawler had completed his first play (unproduced), and in his mid-thirties, he was offered the position of manager-director of the Union Theatre Repertory Company in Melbourne. He accepted eagerly.

Doll

To fully comprehend Lawler’s contribution, it is necessary to consider that since Great Britain had claimed New South Wales as a penal colony in the late eighteenth century, British drama dominated Australian theater. Even after World War II, theater and film in Australia consisted of mainly second-rate British and American works. To counteract this and to promote Australian-born dramatists, the Playwrights' Advisory Board (PAB) and the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) offered prizes and subsidies to native Australian writers who would write plays featuring and starring Australians. Lawler won first prize in the 1952 Commonwealth Jubilee play competition with Cradle of Thunder (1949). In 1954, nine unproduced plays later, he entered a play titled Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) in a national PAB-sponsored playwriting contest and was declared the joint winner, splitting the two-hundred-dollar prize with fellow Australian dramatist Oriel Gray. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll premiered the following year, with Lawler in one of the lead roles.

The play went on to success in London, in several European countries, in the Soviet Union, and on Broadway, where it premiered in January 1958. It won the 1957 Evening Standard Theatre Award for best play and was included in Louis Kronenberger's The Best Plays of 1957–1958 (1958). Lawler also received favorable reviews for his acting in the Australian, London, and New York productions. Ernest Borgnine, Anne Baxter, and John Mills played the leads in a 1959 film adaptation, released in the United States in 1961 under the title Season of Passion (1961).

Later Work

In 1975 the Melbourne Theatre Company offered Lawler the role of literary adviser and commissioned him to write two more plays featuring the characters in Doll. Both new plays were prequels—Kid Stakes (1975), set in the 1930s, and Other Times (1976), set in the 1940s—and the resulting Doll Trilogy premiered in full for the first time at Melbourne's Russell Street Theatre in 1977.

All three plays of the Doll Trilogy feature ordinary working-class Australians who speak in the native vernacular and behave more or less conventionally, except for their unconventional view of marriage. In Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, the two lead male characters, Barney and Roo, have been working for many years as sugarcane cutters in the north and consider themselves mates for life. Each year, they come to Melbourne during their summer layoff to stay at the boardinghouse of Emma Leach and her daughter, Olive, a bartender who is also Roo’s girlfriend. With another woman, Nancy, completing the foursome, the two couples have enjoyed sixteen carefree summers of fun. But this year is very different: Nancy has left and married another man, so Olive tries to replace her with another bartender friend, Pearl, who understands neither Olive’s enthusiastic view of their wonderful summers nor Barney’s code of morality. Even more significantly, Roo is deeply angry at Barney because instead of leaving the field with him after he was injured, Barney chose to remain with a “new friend,” Johnnie Dowd. Somewhat short of cash, Roo has taken a job in a paint factory, and to add insult to injury, when some of the “boys” come to town, Barney brings Johnnie Dowd to Emma’s to “patch things up.”

Roo, realizing that the days of their youth—when they were, according to Olive (as quoted by Pearl), “two eagles flyin’ down out of the sun and coming south every year for the mating season”—are gone forever, has a physical altercation with Barney. Then, settling for a more traditional lifestyle, he asks Olive to marry him, saying he intends to find an ordinary job and remain in Melbourne year-round. Each year, Roo has brought Olive some gifts from the north, including an elaborately dressed Kewpie doll. Now, refusing to acknowledge the truth of the situation, Olive leaves the scene as Roo, in torment, smashes this year’s gift, the seventeenth doll.

Of the other plays in the trilogy, Kid Stakes, set during the Great Depression, shows the beginning relationships of the three principal characters and Nancy, while Other Times, set after World War II, explores more deeply the bond between the men and foreshadows Nancy’s departure.

Among Lawler’s other dramas, The Piccadilly Bushman (1959) examines the condescending attitude of the British toward the “colonials” and the ambivalent attitude of Australians toward Britain; The Man Who Shot the Albatross (1971) deals with the notorious Captain William Bligh, now governor of New South Wales, who cannot help but connect the original mutiny on the HMS Bounty with the military insurrection known as the Rum Rebellion; and Godsend (1982), originally written for British television, has to do with the remains of Thomas Becket, supposedly entombed at Canterbury but quite possibly to be found in a little church in Kent.

Lawler retired from the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1987. He died on July 24, 2024, at home in Melbourne at the age of 103.

Impact

Before Lawler's Doll, there had been a generally negative feeling about “homegrown” Australian dramatic products, but the play's unparalleled international success radically changed that perception and set the stage for later Australian dramaturges. In 1980, Lawler was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. He later received the Order of Australia in 2023.

Personal Life

During the 1956 Australian tour of Doll, Lawler met Brisbane actor Jacklyn “Jackie” Kelleher, who played the supporting character Kathie “Bubba” Ryan. The two married later the same year while still on tour, and Kelleher gave birth to twin sons in 1957 while Doll was playing in London's West End. The couple had a third child, a daughter, in 1959. Lawler and his family lived in England for a time, then Denmark, and finally Ireland because of its favorable tax situation. The family returned to Australia in 1975.

Bibliography

Bartholomeusz, Dennis. “Theme and Symbol in Contemporary Australian Drama: Ray Lawler to Louis Nowra.” Drama and Symbolism, edited by James Redmond. Cambridge UP, 1982, pp. 181–95.

Brisbane, Katharine. “Beyond the Backyard.” Australia Plays: New Australian Drama, edited by Brisbane. Hern, 1989, pp. vii–xxviii.

Fitzpatrick, Peter. After “The Doll”: Australian Drama since 1955. Arnold, 1979.

Hooton, Joy W. “Lawler’s Demythologizing of the Doll: Kid Stakes and Other Times.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 1986, pp. 335–46.

Meacham, Steve. “A Lucky Play.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 Sept. 2011, www.smh.com.au/Accentertainment/theatre/a-lucky-play-20110901-1jmlp.html. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Neill, Rosemary. “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll: Ray Lawler at 93.” The Australian, 25 Apr. 2015, www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/summer-of-the-seventeenth-doll-ray-lawler-at-93/news-story/123456789abcdef. Accessed 8 July 2024.

“Ray Lawler.” National Portrait Gallery, 2010, www.portrait.gov.au/people/ray-lawler-1921. Accessed 8 July 2024.

“Ray Lawler (1921- ).” Doollee: The Playwrights Database, www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsL/lawler-ray.php. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Rees, Leslie. The Making of Australian Drama: A Historical and Critical Survey from the 1830s to the 1970s. Angus, 1973.

Vyas, Heloise. “Ray Lawler, ‘Trailblazing’ Playwright of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Dies Aged 103.” ABC News, 28 July 2024, www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-28/playwright-ray-lawler-dies-aged-103/104152548. Accessed 10 Sept. 2024.