DIRECTOR'S NOTES

Many Australians have heard about Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and a good proportion have seen it, but the play remains largely unproduced overseas. The play’s strengths – the authenticity of language and character that grabbed local audiences in the 1950s – may actually work against the play internationally. Even the original production failed in New York because American audiences and critics found it hard to understand the accents, and it is a difficult play for non-Australian actors to present. Doll is supremely and stubbornly Australian.

Yet, if the language and characters of the play resist globalisation, its themes do not; indeed, they are universal, though expressed in Australian terms. Its themes are transition and change, mateship and loyalty and, above all, shimmering dreams and brute reality. The world of the play is one of proliferating fraud: of self-delusion doubling and redoubling upon itself. (What Williams called “mendacity” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) All the members of the main quartet of characters – Olive the dreamer, cynical Pearl, proud Roo and pliable Barney – are victims of their own self-deceptions. It’s tempting to look to the younger characters of Bubba and Johnnie Dowd as metaphors for the ‘new’ changing face of Australia in the 1950’s – but Bubba resists this change, believing that the ideal life for her is what Olive has had. The tragedy unfolds and repeats across generations.

Robert Jarman