Vale Ray Lawler, one of our greatest playwrights

Ray Lawler’s death should have been a day of national mourning as many in the know regard Summer of the Seventeenth Doll as one of the 20th century’s finest plays.

Playwright Ray Lawler, pictured in 2015, who died at the age of 103.

Live theatre – that most ancient and odd of the arts. People put on a costume, paint their face, stand on a stage and pretend to be someone else. Mouthing words written by someone else. Like Ray Lawler or Arthur Miller.

Vale Ray. A few weeks ago the writer of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll died at the age of 103. To my shame I’d presumed he’d been dead for years. It should have been a day of national mourning as many in the know regard Doll as one of the 20th century’s finest plays. It opened at Melbourne’s Union Theatre in 1955, with Lawler playing cane-cutter Barney. Productions followed in Sydney, London and New York. There was a best-forgotten US film in 1959 with Ernest Borgnine, Angela Lansbury and Anne Baxter – and an all-black production from the Negro Ensemble Company.

I was impressed with another working-class drama, the Australian premiere of which was also at the Union Theatre. It was and remains one of the most important nights of my life. Frank Gatliff played Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. It was a democratised tragedy – not about gods or kings, but an ordinary bloke.

While I never got to interview Lawler, one of the highlights of my 33 years at the ABC was an hour with Arthur Miller, who seemed both surprised and pleased that I avoided the subject of Marilyn Monroe. (Although he kept returning to the topic of his famous missus.) First and foremost I wanted to thank Miller for Death of a Salesman – and for that memorable night in Melbourne. So Miller took delight in retelling what happened when the curtain fell on the play’s opening night on Broadway in 1949. Nothing.

“Total silence,” said the playwright. “Stunned silence that seemed to go on forever. Then a few tentative claps swelled into thunderous applause.”

“Applause,” I suggested, “that has never stopped.”

Since that Melbourne Theatre Company production with Frank Gatliff I’ve seen Willy Loman played by many actors who also tackled great tragic figures such as Hamlet or King Lear – notably Warren Mitchell and Anthony LaPaglia here in Australia. Other Willies? Dustin Hoffman, Brian Dennehy, Lee J. Cobb, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Fredric March – and scores more from the players’ pantheon.

“He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid ... attention must be finally paid to such a person,” says Loman’s wife Linda in Miller’s masterpiece. This must be drama’s most memorable scene involving mortality since Hamlet came across poor Yorick’s skill.

“Attention must be paid.” Not just to kings, or gods. But in the age of democratised drama, to ordinary people like Miller’s salesman and, yes, to Lawler’s cane cutters and their girlfriends. And most certainly to their creators.

(Footnote. As a young actor Barry Humphries was a member of the MTC, and told how Edna Everage was originally created to amuse his fellow actors while touring rural Victoria in a bus. The play on that tour was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Its director? Ray Lawler. Such is the magic of theatre.