Review: The moody charm of Summer of the Seventeeth Doll

Ray Lawler’s classic play adapts superbly into a State Opera SA production at the refashioned Her Majesty’s Theatre in Adelaide.

Classic: State Opera SA’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

In adapting Ray Lawler’s classic Australian play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll into an opera, writer Peter Goldsworthy and composer Richard Mills have cracked a hard nut and created something of a classic themselves.

Full of knockabout charm and teetering emotion just like the original, it captures much of the 1950s play’s spirit while deftly realigning it to fit broadly within the conventions of traditional opera.

In his clever and imaginative libretto, Goldsworthy gives us the same pair of very blokey, beer-drinking canecutters, Barney and Roo, who spend their summers living with an all-female household in working class, inner suburban Melbourne. But he brings poetic utterance and a heightened degree of humanity to the characters’ changing luck.

This in turn allows Mills to produce an enjoyable, scintillatingly coloured score that frequently swings between the moody and ecstatic in a succession of cleanly crafted solo arias, duets and ensembles.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was first performed by Victoria State Opera in 1996, and this new production by State Opera South Australia with Joseph Mitchell directing and Mills conducting once again, has been lavished with care and is skilfully executed. The singing, from a lively cast led by Antoinette Halloran (Olive), Dimity Shepherd (Pearl), Joshua Rowe (Roo) and Bradley Daley (Barney), could hardly be bettered. One is swept up by their vivacity and, ultimately, their misfortune.

At the end of Act 1, a dreamy-eyed Olive sings “I want the strokes of midnight stopped, the clocks turned back” in hymn-like fervour, whereupon her comrades chime in one by one before joining in a soaring quartet.

Two other excellent singers, Elizabeth Campbell (as the crotchety Emma, Olive’s mother) and Desiree Frahn (as an almost manically excitable Bubba), escalate this opera’s emotional turbulence.

Mills’ music trades on well-known sources from Gershwin and Bernstein to Richard Strauss, but does so organically, at once sounding familiar but original. He expresses mood powerfully, as when it transpires that Roo is broke and Emma declares “There’s trouble brewing”. Here the score takes on a menacing tone with allusions to the storm scene in Strauss’s Alpine Symphony.

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra play it all superbly. Their clarity in the newly refashioned Her Majesty’s Theatre is impressive.

The only caveats mainly owe to the play itself. By Act 2, the succession of scenes begins to feel breathless, and the conclusion lacks finality. But everything else hits the mark so successfully that these niggles can almost be forgiven.

Remaining performances have been cancelled because of the temporary lockdown in Adelaide. Reviewed performance: November 14.