Living Doll

Saturday, 28th January 2012

Neil Armfield has given us a vital reading of a great national play

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is the first play by an Australian to command the world’s attention and it is still one of the greatest. The new production of Ray Lawler’s 1955 classic which was first put on in Melbourne by the Union Theatre (from which the Melbourne Theatre Company descends) is by Neil Armfield and was originally seen at Belvoir in Sydney. It is not a flawless production of the Doll, some of the performances are a bit too much on one note, but it is directed with an effortless authority that our theatre hardly dreams of, it has a truly splendid performance by Helen Thomson in the easily distorted role of Pearl and, in the case of Robyn Nevin as the old woman Emma, it has a piece of acting of such textbook perfection, with such a total inhabitation of the idiom of a formidable play, that anyone who cares about the theatre should walk barefoot across deserts to see it. This is the kind of acting that made people flock to see Edith Evans do high comedy or Rex Harrison do Shaw’s dialogue: it is acting of such accomplishment that it has the pure breath of truth. There is nothing in it but reality.

And it’s remarkable how authentic this play still is. We have now got past the point of seeing it as an ocker gabfest, a spectacular demonstration of what Australian lingo can sound like on a grand dramatic piano and can see the affinity the Doll has with the American theatre of its day. This drama of cane-cutters coming down from Queensland for their five month lay-off of love and leisure recalls Tennessee Williams. The kewpie dolls are, in an effortless way, both a symbol and a realistic detail (and The Glass Menagerie is there way in the background). The Doll has that soaring melodic interplay between naturalism and symbolism that is characteristic of the great American postwar drama.

It may seem to be in a minor key compared with Long Day’s Journey Into Night or Death of a Salesman, but it will bear comparison with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and it has that sense of the battles of heart and hearth costing not less than everything, just as it is in step with the British kitchen sink in reclaiming an idiom that had been thought debased.

The difference in the case of the Doll was that it created the pleasing illusion of giving dramatic voice to a nation — which is paradoxically why this play was filmed (bizarrely) with no Australian leads. In any case, Ray Lawler’s influence on our playwrights was massive. We could do worse than remake the Doll as a film, perhaps with Russell Crowe as Roo and Cate Blanchett or Nicole Kidman as Olive and Guy Pearce as Barney. It might be a good idea to do it while the directors who understand the idiom — Fred Schepisi, say, or Bruce Beresford — are still in the saddle. In any case, film producers would search a long way to find better casting than Robyn Nevin’s Emma or Helen Thomson’s Pearl.

These are bold rubies of performances and they belong in the roll call of great performers in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll down the years: Noel Ferrier and Zoe Caldwell, or Frankie J. Holden and Genevieve Picot who I saw play Roo and Olive in 1995 (under Nevin’s direction) as well as I ever expect to see those roles played.

It was a packed house, not least of thespians, who were there at the Playhouse on a hot Melbourne night and gathered later at Young and Jacksons to celebrate. John Sumner, the man for whom Olivier wrote a reference when he came to run a theatre company in Melbourne, was there and so too was the playwright. When Ray Lawler came onstage at the end of the performance it was like the reanimation of a lost world. The man who wrote the play 60-odd years ago was sounding silvery, the old educated Australian accent with an Irish cello at the back of it like an ancient music.

And it was an unusually festive first night audience which included everyone from Dion Mills, such a mainstay of an actor for Red Stitch, to the redoubtable Essie Davies, the woman who is a wonder in The Slap and is about to play Kerry Greenwood’s female Lord Peter Wimsey, Phrynne Fisher, the posh feminist sleuth, in a TV series which has been meant to happen for decades now.

There’s nothing posh about Doll. The voice of suffering womanhood (and of the men who try to comfort it) rises up in the play which Neil Armfield directs with the monumentality of Wagner. The set by Ralph Myers is like a gargantuan magnification of an old working household’s living room and the vastness of the sparely furnished space, lit with strengthening crimson to simulate the dawning heat of summer on this 1950s Carlton house, has something of the abstract minimalist magnificence Armfield gave to his vast silk sheet on which he sketched his Tristan back in the late Eighties.

This is a Doll of some grandeur and it is performed with two intervals, preserving the unity of the three-act structure, its pace steady and its drama gruelling as the angst-tinged romance of the play’s gesticulated comedy edges into darkness and grief.

It’s not nearly as moody or histrionic as the great production of the Doll which Robyn Nevin directed in the 1990s as if she were slashing graffiti of genius on a crumbling brick wall in a narrow cobblestoned laneway. It’s a sombre production with touches of hilarity rather than a moody liquor-lit farce tilting into tragedy.

On the comic side, Helen Thomson’s Pearl is marvellous. She’s done up to the nines in ladylike Fifties clobber, and the heavily made-up face goes into great simulations of self-delight and point-scoring only to collapse for an instant into open-mouthed self-doubt of a pantingly naked kind. It’s a superb piece of portraiture well on the humane side of caricature, and it captures like an X-ray the raw uncertain awkwardness that lies at the heart of so much Australian style and sophistication.

Alison Whyte’s Olive, in contrast, is lacquered in layer after layer of longing and pain though the performance, which gains in power, never reaching a point of full catharsis.

Of the male leads, Travis McMahon as Barney gives a wholly convincing human face to the bluffing poser who loves his mate. There is absolutely no hint of bushwhacking campness to the performance though at the expense of the kind of raconteuring magic which would explain how Barney thrills women even as his powers flicker.

As Roo Steve Le Marquand is powerful and, within the limits of the conception, has an authentic darkness and ability to convey pain. It is a relatively narrow conception, however, and we get more of a sense of a blind Australian bull facing the matador barbs of fate than we do of a humorous rounded man who has come to the end of his limited tether.

But for the thing itself, the spirit from which all vernaculars come, we go to Robyn Nevin. Her Emma is a thing of glory: leathery, dazzlingly shrewd, subtly compassionate, often brutal. It has no hint of the generalised or the approximate. It’s a cameo that lights everything around it and both its comedy and its apprehension of the poignancy of the whole dramatic situation are wonders to behold. Robyn Nevin no more sounds like an old working-class battleaxe than John Gielgud sounded like a patrician Englishman. She penetrates to a level of truth to make us see the thing that underlies the stereotype.

The Doll is us, and in this grand production — which is of a standard so far above usual for our theatre it’s not funny — Robyn Nevin as Emma is the quintessence of everything in Australian drama that is true and mighty and inimitable.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is at the Playhouse Theatre in Melbourne until 18 February.

More articles from: Peter Craven | this section

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