Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is an Australian play written by Ray Lawler and first performed at the Union Theatre in Melbourne on 28 November 1955.

This is the period of “the layover”, five months of sex and fun which they traditionally share with two city women, named Olive and Nancy.

And it turns out that Roo has had a bad season up north: he is broke and is forced to take a humiliating job in a paint factory.

The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll had its world premiere on 28 November 1955, where it opened at the Union Theatre in Melbourne.

The play toured New South Wales and Queensland, returning to Sydney for an encore season, and featured the following cast: After the final Sydney show of the play's country tour, The Doll moved to the United Kingdom, where it spent two weeks showing in Nottingham, Liverpool and Edinburgh before opening in London on 30 April 1957, with the following cast:[3] Encouraged by its wholehearted reception in Australia and Britain, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll took a trip to America, where audiences and critics were rather underwhelmed with the production, most likely due to drastic cultural differences.

Variety wrote "When Lawler finally gets around to it, along about the middle of the third act, “Summer of the 17th Doll" is a fairly absorbing play.

[5] However, in 1967, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll featuring an all-black cast, was produced to great acclaim as one of four plays in the inaugural season of The Negro Ensemble Company with an international bill that included Kongi's Harvest by Wole Soyinka, Song of the Lusitanian Bogey by Peter Weiss, and Daddy Goodness by American playwright Richard Wright.

After continuing to tour Australia through 1958, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was adapted by Leslie Norman for Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions – whose first film had been Marty with Ernest Borgnine – for United Artists in 1959.

[8][9]| Notable productions include:[10] In 2013 Currency Press released an iPad app which charted the 57-year history of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.