Play tags ageing Australian drama Print sources Title Radio Times, (Magazine) Linking notes pp. Date of transmission Monday Time 8.30pm Series Theatre Night Channel BBC Television Production company BBC Theatre company St James’ Players, Australia Credits Director John Sumner Television Presentation by Alan Sleath Playwright Ray Lawler Set Designer Anne Fraser Introduced by Ray Lawler Cast Ethel GabrielĪdditional details Extant status No archival copy is known to exist. Turned into an Australian-British film directed by Leslie Norman in 1959. Production history First performed at the Union Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, on 28 November 1955. This summer, however, things have changed: Roo is feeling his age and Barney’s girlfriend has deserted him for marriage with another.

This is the seventeenth summer that Roo and Barney, two cane-cutters, have come south to spend their five months of lay-off from work with two girlfriends. The scene is a double-storied terraced cottage during the hot weather of December 1952. Denny will be supported by a highly-experienced creative team.Play synopsis The play is set in the State of Victoria, Australia. Part of HIT Production’s Australian Voice Tours for 2022, this production will be directed by the award-winning, Denny Lawrence, whose history with HIT Productions includes many successful productions including Shirley Valentine, Always…Patsy Cline, Educating Rita, Glorious!, Hotel Sorrento and most recently, My Brilliant Divorce. This ‘off-season’ proves challenging for them all. One of the barmaids has ‘settled down’ and married a city bloke so a replacement date has had to be found. This seventeenth summer everything is different. Lawler’s much loved tale of Queensland cane cutters and Melbourne barmaids has endured, not through nostalgia, nor because it spawned a new age in Australian writing, but because the characters and their dilemmas are so true, so beautifully observed, so humorous and so poignant.Ī triumph at its 1955 Melbourne premiere, followed by a national tour and hugely successful season in London’s West End where it won an award for best new play, this 2020 production of the Australian classic Summer of the Seventeenth Doll celebrates the 65th Anniversary of this iconic play.įor sixteen years two Queensland cane cutters have worked the punishing routine up north in the sugar cane fields for seven months of the year and travelled back to Melbourne to meet up for five months of partying and romance with their barmaid girlfriends. Plays and playwrights go in and out of fashion but some endure and speak to each subsequent generation.

A production by Christine Harris & HIT Productions.

Summer of 17th doll