Summer of the Seventeenth Doll playwright Ray Lawler dies aged 103

One of Australia’s most celebrated playwrights, Melbourne writer, actor and director Ray Lawler, has died at the age of 103.

The giant of Australian theatre died on Wednesday after a brief illness, according to performing arts publisher Currency Press.

Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was a huge hit around Australia when the play premiered in 1955, before touring to London’s West End and on New York’s Broadway to widespread acclaim.

Melbourne playwright Ray Lawler in 2011.Credit: Anthony Johnson

In 1957, it won the Evening Standard Award for best new play on the London stage. In 1959, it was made into a film starring Ernest Borgnine and Angela Lansbury.

The Doll was originally staged by the Union Theatre Repertory Company in 1955, with Lawler playing the central character of Barney, a Queensland cane cutter.

It was not the only play written by Lawler, who was born in Footscray in 1921. He wrote many more, and by the time it premiered The Doll was the eighth that he had penned – but it was by far the most successful. It was also one of the first plays to unashamedly bring Australia’s working-class vernacular to the stage, and has since been lauded as among the nation’s greatest works of theatre.

Its characters “Barney, Roo, Pearl and Emma are real people,” critic Biddy Allen wrote in The Argus in 1955. “We know their faces, their voices – we share their dreams, we understand their failures.”

Lawler, along with John Sumner, founded the Union Theatre Repertory Company in 1953, which would later become Melbourne Theatre Company. The MTC has since named one of its stages – the intimate performance space The Lawler at the Southbank Theatre – after him.

Theatre director and former Adelaide Festival co-director Neil Armfield paid tribute to Lawler, describing him as “an incredibly beautiful man” and Australia’s greatest playwright.

“There have been some brilliant Australian playwrights after Ray, but [apart from The Doll] no other play has this position of defining the country somehow,” Armfield told this masthead on Saturday.

Playwright Ray Lawler and director Neil Armfield on the set of the 2011 Belvoir St Theatre production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.Credit: Marco Del Grande

Melbourne Theatre Company in a Facebook post on Friday night wrote that it was “saddened to hear of the passing of Ray Lawler, former Melbourne Theatre Company artistic director and trailblazer of Australian playwriting”.

“Lawler’s 1955 play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was a turning point in Australian theatre history, and this legacy continues today, decades later, in the company’s commitment to fostering new Australian writing,” it wrote.

“Our thoughts are with Ray’s family and friends, and the theatre community.”

National Institute of Dramatic Art artistic director-in-residence David Berthold, a former Brisbane Festival director and director of Brisbane’s La Boite Theatre and Sydney’s Griffin Theatre, also paid tribute to Lawler.

“Ray Lawler, 103, has died in Melbourne. His family announced that Lawler died peacefully on Wednesday evening after a brief illness,” he wrote on Facebook late on Friday.

“He contributed much more than Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, but it remains one of the great plays of the 20th century and one that bears indelible witness to the Australian psyche.

“All at once it’s 1953 inner-city Melbourne, Queensland cane fields and an uncompromising account of the unyielding desire of the human heart to remain young.”

Lawler, a longtime resident of Elwood in Melbourne’s south-east, is survived by his wife, the actress Jacklyn Kelleher, their three children, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

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