June Jago

So here's a diverting Gamefor theatre aficionados to play in lockdown. Which plays can you name that might claim to express, or represent, or in some way be synonymous with, the culture and mythologies of their country of origin? Peer Gynt maybe? Or maybe not. Henry V? Possibly, but what about The Importance of Being Earnest? … Death of a Salesman? Or should that be Angels in America? We could expand it perhaps to other dramatic forms: Don Giovanni? La Boheme? The Mahabaratha? And a range of other works, no doubt, that I am too ill-informed to suggest.

Act 1 Scene 1: Pearl (Madge Ryan) and Olive (June Jago), photographed during the London season, 1957. Photo by Angus McBean.

Harvard Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Act 1 Scene 1: Olive (June Jago), Barney (Ray Lawler) and Emma (Ethel Gabriel), Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1957 (return season). Photo by Ivan Ive.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

But when it comes to Australian theatre, it’s a short conversation, and a one-horse race. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, sixty-six years old now, its author this year a centenarian, remains the only genuine contender. Ray Lawler’s play about two cane-cutters coming down from far north Queensland to splurge their pay-packets with a couple of Melbourne barmaids was a watershed in the fragmented history of Australian writing for the stage.

When many decades ago I set out to write a critical history of Australian plays (After ‘The Doll’: Australian Drama since 1955, in 1979) it barely occurred to me that there was anything particularly odd about singling out one play among all the others for its title—let alone assuming that it would be easily recognisable from its affectionate diminutive, ‘The Doll’. None of the reviewers at the time thought there was anything unusual about that choice, either. It seemed self-evident that the big story properly began with Ray Lawler’s play, and that nothing could ever be the same after it.

These days the choice to foreground a single play in this way would be much more worthy of remark, and probably of stern critique. Writing about Australian theatre has become much less focused on particular plays and playwrights (‘Australian Drama’was an equally uncontentious element of the subtitle), and much more on the history of performance in Australia—the work of individual companies and theatre-makers, the theatre as industry.

The notion of playwrights attempting to define and explore the things that might be distinctive of their culture, representing some kind of construction of ‘national identity’, has been replaced by a concern with pluralities and proud marginalities, and an emphasis on work that challenges or subverts the presumed cultural mainstream.

Lawler was clearly conscious of working with a model of distinctive Australian-ness; though he recalled his ‘inspiration’ in writing the people of ‘The Doll’ in a number of ways (ranging from conversations overheard in bars to the rather disingenuous claim that he set out to write a play with a rewarding role for a short male actor like himself!¹), the play is steeped in his fascination with capturing working-class behaviors and idioms, all of it firmly based in an intimate knowledge of the local vernacular.

Act 1 Scene 1: Barney, Olive, Pearl, Emma and Roo, Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1957. Photo by Ivan Ive.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Act 1 Scene 2: Barney and Pearl, Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1956. Photo by Henry Talbot.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Like most dramatisations of a particular social milieu at a particular time, I suspect, the snapshot of Australian culture in The Doll was even in 1955 one in slightly faded retrospect; indeed retrospection, in terms of the style of the play and its content, might be seen as the defining quality of ‘The Doll’. Its quintessentially naturalistic mode was one dimension of that, at a time when theatre was pushing the notions of what ‘reality’ was understood to mean. And its plot, set in the seventeenth and last year of the ‘lay-off’, continually reaches back into summers that really do seem to have consisted of ‘happy days and glamorous nights’.

The homogeneity of the culture it presents is the most striking element of this backward-looking inclination of the play; this is Carlton in 1953, a working-class inner suburb of Melbourne, where everyone has an Anglo-Irish background. The Leech household (Olive’s surname must be a mischievous acknowledgement of her inclination to cling) is at its centre. But its visitors for its seventeenth summer are Roo Webber, Barney Ibbot, the disappointing Pearl Cunningham, and the most unwelcome Johnny Dowd; doughty Anglo-Saxons, every one. And so are its immediate neighbours, the Ryans, Bubba’s family, and its New Year hosts for the last sixteen years, the Morrises—Nancy’s people, who obviously can’t be visited any more since she abandoned the summers with Barney for respectable marriage to a ‘book bloke’.

Act 2 Scene 1: Olive, Bubba, Roo, Barney and Pearl, Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1957. Photo by Ivan Ive.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Act 2 Scene 1: Barney, Olive, Pearl and Emma, photographed during the London season, 1957. Photo by Angus McBean.

Harvard Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

But Carlton, even in 1953, was becoming what we now call a multicultural community. The wave of Italian migration was already transforming the suburb into a very different (and much more interesting) society; it had done that already to Collingwood, a couple of kilometres away, where the collision of cultures was to prompt, in Richard Beynon’s The Shifting Heart (1957), a powerful treatment of the troubles of the Bianchi family in their difficult and finally tragic engagement with entrenched Australian prejudice. The Doll, perhaps even at its premiere in 1955, probably by its London triumph in 1958, and certainly in its wonderfully celebratory reincarnation as the point of no return in the staging of The Doll Trilogy (including two new ‘prequels’, Kid Stakes, the summer of the first doll, and Other Times, the summer of the ninth) in 1976, was a rich exercise in nostalgia.² Even the pretty egregious movie adaptation of the play, Season of Passion (1959), was prompted to add an Italian, Dino, to the cane-cutting crew.³ Lawler himself acknowledged something of the new cosmopolitanism when, in Other Times, he introduced the bookish Austrian Josef Hultz as a possible (and in a wartime context, very controversial) romantic interest for Nancy.

The same might be said for the mode of the play, of course. It’s classic three-act naturalism, with a single set crammed with sociological markers that ensures that its audience is finely attuned to every alteration: when the grim reality of what is left after the dolls and the corals are gone, it’s hard not to feel the horror of what Olive, especially, has lost, and the bleakness of the future that she faces. We become aware through the play of every alteration, every sound from the floor above or the world outside; each one of them changes the on-stage action decisively. The decision to expose the stairs to the unseen floor upstairs was a master-stroke: the grand entrance is from the moment of Olive’s first appearance (‘Hang onto your hats and mittens, kids, here I come!’) a very theatrical way of focusing a powerful shift in dynamic.

Olive (June Jago), photographed during the London season, 1957. Photo by Angus McBean.

Harvard Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Pearl (Madge Ryan), photographed during the London season, 1957. Photo by Angus McBean.

Harvard Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

All of this might seem to imply a view of Lawler’s major play that consigns it to a museum; a place for good scripts that no-one performs any more. But that’s not what the performance history of ‘The Doll’ suggests, nor what this essay aims to explore. 

Ray Lawler’s career has been very thoroughly outlined in essays previously published here by Frank Van Straten and by Simon Plant, in his wonderfully informative survey of the fate of ‘The Doll’ on the American stage. They have covered the historical territory marvellously. In the light of that, my best contribution to this centenary celebration, I think, is an analysis of Lawler’s one great play, in the context of its continuing currency—not as an exhibit in a museum, but as a viable part of a contemporary repertoire. There have certainly been a couple of seasons that have demonstrated its genuine adaptability—the all-Black production for the inaugural season of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967, and the brilliantly avant-garde staging by the Australian Nouveau Theatre at Anthill in Melbourne in 1983, directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon; I saw the latter, and will never forget its brilliant evocation of a hot and listless New Year’s Eve in the syncopated slapping down of cards and swatting at mosquitoes. A chamber opera version in two acts, written by Richard Mills (music) and Peter Goldsworthy (libretto), was commissioned by the Victoria State Opera, and premiered on 19 October 1996 at the Playhouse in Melbourne; the commission was a mark of the status (and perhaps marketability) of the play, but also of its rich potential for creative re-imaginings.

There’s no need, for the audience of this essay, to retell the story of the play, or even to revisit the richness of its characters. These things are well enough known, and have held up remarkably well against the passing of time. Some of the dialogue is charmingly dated (sadly, few people today would know what it means to ‘poke mullock’, though in an age when everyone seems inclined to conspicuous scepticism it would be a handy term; and no one, I suspect, would know a ‘Jimmy Woodser’, though there are still plenty of them around). And ‘The Doll’ is a play that, even in the mid-fifties, doesn’t even admit a phone-call; if Bubba wants to contact Johnny Dowd at the cheap joint where he and the rest of the gang are staying, she will need to find a way to leave a note for him. So the notion of the play as time-capsule has some validity. The notion that it is bound by its time, however, is false.

Emma (Ethel Gabriel), Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1956. Photo by Henry Talbot.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Bubba (Fenella Maguire), Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1956. Photo by Henry Talbot.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Part of its continuing cultural relevance lies in the play’s questioning of the values by which you might choose to live a life. I suspect that the respectable perspectives of outsiders like Pearl, and implicitly, perhaps, of Nancy, whose critique of careless-of-tomorrow hedonism is as pervasive in her absence as her glowing vivacity, have less weight now than they carried in 1955. The cost of Olive’s perennially adolescent expectation that life should always be fun is clear enough in the bleakness of her final scene with Roo, in which she furiously rejects the conventional compensation of his marriage proposal, cradles the smashed seventeenth doll as surrogate for the child she will never have, and heads out to another meaningless shift at the pub. But even the homespun sagacity of Emma contests the misplaced sense of superiority that someone like Pearl can feel; when Emma takes on something of the mantle of a biblical prophet to spell out what Roo at the end has failed to learn, she is far from rejecting the value of the lay-offs of the past:

EMMA:  …  There’s a time for sowing and a time for reaping—and reapin’ is what you’re doing now.

It’s one of the few occasions in the show when Emma picks up her final g’s. But it’s a long way from Pearl’s complacent and comforting view that the whole thing has been a silly delusion. Emma is arguing that sixteen good summers out of seventeen ain’t bad. It’s possible that a contemporary audience, all too conscious of the costs and fragility of all commitments, might be more sympathetic to that view than those first audiences at the Union Theatre.

Bubba certainly sees the pertinence of the view that a few seasons of great happiness are preferable to a lifetime of tepid contentment. Her perspective is immediately qualified because it is that of a very young and inexperienced woman, and it’s complicated further by the possibility that she might be repeating Olive’s ‘mistake’; but there’s also a chance that Bubba might have seen enough lay-offs to live them for a while, or a long time, or maybe even for a life. Life-choices have always been complicated, but perhaps they are more so today than they seemed in 1955.

The other element of the play that has stood up remarkably well is its treatment of gendered behaviour, and of the patterns of heterosexual relationship. Both these propositions are in our time continually up for grabs, and inevitably contested at every level. The culture as I write is one in which the choice to perform Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and then every subsequent choice (interpretative, but also casting and stylistic) would be contentious. Respectful ‘museum’ revisitings might even prove too provocatively ‘conservative’ to stage.

Act 2 Scene 2: Bubba (Fenella Maguire) and Johnnie (John Llewellyn), Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1957. Photo by Ivan Ive.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Act 2 Scene 2: Roo (Kenneth Warren) and Johnnie (Richard Pratt), photographed during the London season, 1957. Photo by Angus McBean.

Harvard Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Even in this hyper-sensitive climate, Ray Lawler’s play still looks very astute on patterns of male and female behaviour in relationships. We don’t need to assume or to argue that these patterns are universal or even normative to see these perceptions as very astute—in 1955, as they were, but also in 2021. The play explores the stereotype of male emotional reticence, especially as a source of power or limitation in the matriarchal Leech household, on every page. The seventeenth doll prompts an immediate contrast:

OLIVE. … But the dolls—they’re something you thought of by yourself. So they’re special!

[He grunts, embarrassed. She fluffs out the doll’s skirts.]

And don’t make noises at me, they are. Where’ll I put her?

ROO. [Glancing around] Gettin’ a bit crowded, maybe you should start upstairs.

OLIVE. [crossing to vase] No. I won’t, she’s staying right here with the others. [places doll in vase] Look at her now, she just dazzles yer.

ROO. [touched but gruffly] She’s all right.

OLIVE. Beautiful.

As Olive has already warned Pearl (in relation to more delicate matters than conversational style), ‘these are a coupla sugarcane-cutters fresh from the tropics—not two professors from the university’, and Lawler draws on Roo’s lack of an emotional vocabulary as a powerful source of sub-text. It’s not a failure to feel (Roo in that sequence is ‘touched’ by the kewpie doll almost as sentimentally as Olive), but an inability to articulate feeling within the constraints of the strong, silent male role. It weights his every interaction with the power of understatement. Olive immediately registers the implicit moral objection in his introduction to Pearl:

ROO.  Missus Cunningham, is it?

OLIVE. [quickly] Yes, she’s a widow.

ROO. [understandingly] Ah.

And the excruciating awkwardness of being discovered by Johnnie Dowd dozing on the couch after a hard day’s work at the paint factory renders Roo barely able to speak:

DOWD.  ‘Lo Roo.

ROO.  Lo.

DOWD.  Y’look like you been paintin’ the town.

ROO.  Yeh.

This tendency for strength of feeling to deny, and to be confirmed and measured by, the loss of the power of speech adds particular dramatic force to his final scene with Olive. We are painfully aware of how hard it is for Roo to find and say the words as he kneels to her and strikes the floor with his hand (‘This is the dust we’re in and we’re gunna walk through it like everyone else for the rest of our lives!’); when she rejects his proposal, and words have failed altogether, that strength of feeling can only be expressed in the ‘violent, insensate rage’in which he smashes the seventeenth doll to pieces.

Act 2 Scene 2: Barney and Roo, Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1957. Photo by Ivan Ive.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Act 2 Scene 2: Barney, Roo and Olive, Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1957. Photo by Ivan Ive.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Barney, the smaller of the two men, is also defined in his beta-male status by his habit of ‘blabbergutsin’. His gift of the gab has been pretty handy (at least until recently) when it comes to charming the ladies. But nonetheless he is one of the ‘coupla kings’ that Olive defines against the ‘soft city blokes’ who stand aside when these heroes walk to the bar; and he, too, reverts to male stereotype in moments of genuine emotion. When Roo gives him Bubba’s ‘snaps of Nancy’s wedding’, he ‘looks at them a long moment’ them before articulating (‘unemotionally’) what he feels:

BARNEY. She must have been ravin’ mad. [He shoves photos into pocket] What’s there in the paper?

The authenticity of his kind-of love is defined precisely by his seeming indifference.

Summer of the Seventeenth Dollin its final act reveals itself, if we hadn’t twigged it before, as a play not just about Australian cultural shibboleths but about mortality and meaning. That’s the reason, finally, for its greatness and its longevity, just as every work of art that aspires to universality tends to be grounded in the cultural here and now.

Lawler’s acutely tuned ear for the Australian vernacular, and his mastery in rendering it, is almost as great a strength in a new century as it was that night in late November 1955 when it premiered at Melbourne’s Union Theatre, or on the London opening in 1957 that prompted the critic from the Star to declare, ‘It’s taken a long time but the kangaroos must be smiling today’.⁴ Looking back in the middle of a lockdown in 2021, some of its status may be a little compromised by the fact that Summer of the Seventeenth Doll became, almost overnight, a very big fish in a very small pool. Some of its significance as a landmark in our culture can seem, at this distance, a bit spuriously sentimental;  the MTC programme note for the staging of The Doll Trilogy in 1976 offered a calculation that even then seemed a little bizarre:

By 1976, Olive would be 61 years of age. Barney and Nancy would be 63, and Roo, if he were alive, would be 64.⁵

It’s hard to imagine, in relation to my opening whimsy about culturally definitive plays and characters, a production of Henry V that informed us that in 1976 he would have been 590, or one of Death of a Salesman that alerted us to the fact that Willy Loman (aged 63 at the play’s premiere in 1949) would that year have turned 100. It’s partly a reflection of a culture anxious to embrace a play that would now, probably, be publicised as ‘an Australian icon’, as well as of a tendency, obviously, to confuse fictional characters with actual people. But it’s also a mark of the capacity of very good writers not only to reflect, but to shape, their culture.

Act 3 Scene 1: Roo (Lloyd Berrell) and Olive (June Jago), Elizabethan Theatre, Sydney, 1956. Photo by Henry Talbot.

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

Act 3 Scene 1: Roo (Kenneth Warren), photographed during the London season, 1957. Photo by Angus McBean.

Harvard Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

So on the 23rd of May this year, when (by the MTC’s calculations) Olive would have been 106, Barney and Nancy 108, and Roo (‘if he were still alive’) 109, we should all have raised a glass to Ray Lawler: those of us who care passionately about Australian theatre, and all those others who know little about it and care less, but whose cultural roots are defined by or against the world he made real.

Happy hundredth, Mr Lawler.

Endnotes

1. See John McCallum’s note, ‘Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’, in Companion to Theatre in Australia, ed. Philip Parsons with Victoria Chance, Currency Press, 1995, p.565

2. The Trilogy was in itself a kind of homage to Lawler, with the plays staged both separately and (as a ‘special occasion’) in sequence. Nancy is every bit as prominent a presence in these two ‘prequels’ as she is an absence in the summer of the seventeenth.

3. The film notoriously internationalised its major roles, with Ernest Borgnine as Roo making little effort to hide his American accent in the role of Roo, and John Mills trying hard to modify his English one as Barney. The American actress Anne Baxter and the English Angela Lansbury completed the main cast, as Olive and Pearl respectively. The wonderful Ethel Gabriel, who had played Emma in its Sydney season and in London, reprised the role in the film, as the only survivor from its stage versions.

4. Star (London), 1 May 1957, p.

5. The ages are a little at odds with those given in the original script, but it seems a bit beside the point to cavil. And as a septuagenarian, I’m inclined to resent the assumption that 64 might represent a good innings.

Dion Boucicault Jr, 1927

From theatre program

Irene Vanbrugh, 1928

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

The biggest successof the theatre’s first years was a four-month season by British husband and wife stars Dion Boucicault Jr and Irene Vanbrugh, beginning on 21 July. Their repertoire, which occasionally echoed that of the old Brough–Boucicault company, included plays by Pinero, A.A. Milne and Frederick Lonsdale—notably a first Australian production of Lonsdale’s On Approval on 20 October.

The arrival of sound films and the imminent Great Depression made 1929 the first of several patchy years. But the attractions included seasons by the reigning imported dramatic favourite Leon Gordon, English actor Lewis Shaw starring in John Van Druten’s then sensational Young Woodley, and a short revival of Sweet Nell of Old Drury with the beloved Nellie Stewart.

American actor William Faversham, 1931

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Nellie Stewart, 1931

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Spanish-American comic actor Leo Carrillo interrupted the beginning of a busy Hollywood career to star in Lombardi Limited from 29 February 1930. This ran until mid April when Nellie Stewart, together with her daughter Nancye and son-in-law Mayne Lynton, starred in Edward Sheldon’s Romance. 1930 also saw seasons by English actor William Faversham and American actress Edith Taliaferro. The Firm was not too proud to refuse a six-night lease for the Victorian Amateur Boxing and Wrestling Championships early in September either. But the longest running single attraction of the period was St. John Irvine’s play, The First Mrs Fraser, which notched up 67 performances from 26 December—a very good run for the times.

Gregan McMahon and his repertory players first came to the Comedy on 17 March 1931. McMahon, who also directed more commercial fare for The Firm, had entered into an arrangement for the use of their theatres when they fell vacant and his group were frequent occupants of the Comedy throughout the 1930s. Their first offering was a comedy called Yellow Sands which featured McMahon and rising local actress Coral Brown(e). This was followed by Galsworthy’s The Roof. Each play ran for five nights.

Frank Harvey, 1931

From theatre program

Ethel Morrison

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

British actor Frank Harvey in a couple of Edgar Wallace thrillers interspersed with Galsworthy’s Loyalties held the stage for two months from 4 April 1931 and returned for another month in September. Prior to this came a short run of the comedy A Warm Corner, whose cast included Ethel Morrison, Cecil Kellaway, Campbell Copelin and Coral Brown(e), who also supported Harvey in his later season.

Nellie Bramley and her company, with their policy of weekly change popular drama, came to the Comedy on 26 March 1932 but transferred to the Palace after three weeks, leaving the theatre dark—apart from short runs by McMahon’s Players—for the rest of that year. 1933 was equally bleak, beginning with a couple of transfers from the King’s, including a fortnight of the Athene Seyler–Nicholas Hannen season from 15 April. A short-lived Ben Travers farce, A Bit of a Test, followed this but for the rest of the year the theatre was used only by amateurs.

1934 brought some improvement, with the Melbourne premiere of Ivor Novello’s Fresh Fields on 18 May. Then came a popular thriller, Ten Minute Alibi, followed by a light comedy, The Wind and the Rain. Both of these starred Englishman George Thirlwell and Australia’s Jocelyn Howarth in a run totalling fourteen weeks from 25 August. The Russian Ballet, transferring from the King’s, ended the year with a week-long run from Christmas Eve.

Ruth Draper. Photo by Max Dupain.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Coppin plaque

State Library Victoria, Melbourne

A trio of modern comedies got 1935 off to a moderate start but other offerings petered out by early April and returned only fitfully towards the end of the year. From 11 January 1936 The Firm bowed to the inevitable and reopened the Comedy as a cinema screening first releases and revivals, beginning with a British double bill comprising The Constant Nymph and Man of Aran.

This policy continued over the next three years with only occasional interruptions for live attractions. Notable plays and players in this period were a month long run of Emlyn Williams’ thriller, Night Must Fall, from 15 February 1936; famous American impressionist Ruth Draper in a series of character sketches for a month from 16 May 1938; British silent film star Betty Balfour in a comedy called Personal Appearance for a fortnight from 20 August 1938; another month-long run for a thriller called Black Limelight from 8 April 1939; and American stage and screen actor Ian Keith in Libel during August 1939. It was also in this year that the bronze plaque honouring George Coppin was installed in the Comedy’s foyer. Unveiled by his daughter Lucy on 26 March, it was dedicated to ‘The Hon. George Selth Coppin, Philanthropist and Father of the Theatre in Victoria’.

Marie Ney and Hal Thompson in Private Lives, 1940

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Marjorie Gordon, the star of Susan and God, 1941

Theatre Heritage Australia

The Comedy switched to foreign film revivals in March 1940 but from 14 September British actress Marie Ney was starred in the thriller Ladies in Retirement for six weeks; she returned from the King’s for the last three weeks of Private Lives on 23 December. Also notable in 1940 was a two-night debut season by the Borovansky Australian Ballet Company on 9 and 10 December—the very first presentation of ballet in Australia by a locally nurtured company.

March–April 1941 saw the last seasons by the Gregan McMahon Players. McMahon himself died only a few months later in August—but immediately following came a fresh lease of life for the Comedy when JCW entered into an arrangement with David N. Martin to present a series of plays from his Minerva Theatre in Sydney. These began with Room for Two, a comedy starring Marjorie Gordon and Hal Thompson, which ran for a month from 12 April 1941. This was followed by another comedy, Susan and God, which also starred Gordon, and ran for a then record 228 performances from 17 May.

Aileen Britten, c.1942. Photo by Ritter-Jeppersen Studios, Melbourne.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Gwenda Wilson and Madge Aubrey in Kiss and Tell, 1943

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Polished British actor Edwin Styles was the resident star for almost a year from 4 April 1942, beginning in the comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, which ran for 161 performances. This was followed by Robert’s Wife, a comedy drama by St. John Irvine, Daphne Du Maurier’s romantic drama Rebecca, and Robert Sherwood’s romantic comedy, Reunion in Vienna. These and other Minerva attractions employed such rising or established local talents as Dick Bentley, Aileen Britten, Letty Craydon, Keith Eden, Claude Flemming, Sheila Helpman(n), Lloyd Lamble, Hal Lashwood, John McCallum, Muriel Steinbeck and Bettina Welch.

The classic black farce Arsenic and Old Lace was the first fresh attraction of 1943, and was followed by the comedy My Sister Eileen and Lillian Hellman’s drama, Watch on the Rhine. On 12 November came a second, month long season by the Borovansky Ballet and, from 11 December, Kiss and Tell. This very successful F. Hugh Herbert comedy had run close to 200 performances when it was ‘suspended until further notice’ by an Actors Equity strike on 26 March 1944. This was the first major industrial action taken by actors in Australia and was resolved after three weeks with victory for the strikers and the adoption of compulsory union membership for the profession. Kiss and Tell resumed on 10 June 1944 and went on to establish an all-time record for a straight play at the Comedy, with a run of 414 performances.

Edwin Styles returned for another long stay on 23 December 1944 in The Amazing Doctor Clitterhouse, which ran until 11 April 1945 and was followed by Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit which played even more successfully, until 7 September. A short break from the middlebrow, mostly lightweight fare now familiar at the Comedy came on 5 April 1946 when The Firm presented Doris Fitton and her Independent Theatre company from Sydney in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. All thirteen acts of this American adaptation of classic Greek tragedy were played out for twelve nights between 6.30 pm. and 11 pm, with a twenty-minute interval at 8 pm.

Madge Elliott and Cyril Ritchard in Shadow Play, 1946. Photo by S.J. Hood.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Program cover for the Kiwi Revue Company’s Cassino which opened on 21 December 1946

Theatre Heritage Australia

Australian-based international stage stars Cyril Ritchard and Madge Elliott opened at the Comedy on 17 August 1946 in three Noël Coward one-acters, Ways and Means, Family Albumand Shadow Play and played profitably until 14 December. Following them came the Kiwis, an all-male New Zealand wartime concert party company formed in Egypt in 1941. Now sponsored by The Firm, the Kiwis opened on 20 December 1946 in Alamein, the first of three fast moving revues. On 16 August 1947 this was replaced by a second revue called Tripoli and on 10 January 1948 came Benghazi. On the following 20 November came a ‘farewell’—a compendium of all three shows—which ran until 6 January 1949. In total the Kiwis played for a phenomenal 867 consecutive performances—an all-time record for an individual attraction at the Comedy.

Ken Fraser and June Jago in Fly Away Peter, 1949. Photo by Hal Williamson.

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Program cover for Edward, My Son, Comedy Theatre, 1949

Theatre Heritage Australia

Plays returned on 8 January 1949 with Garson Kanin’s comedy, Born Yesterday, followed by a London success, Fly Away Peter, then an American farce called Separate Rooms. All these did well but the stellar highlight of the year was British comic actor Robert Morley opposite Sophie Stewart in his own play, Edward, My Son, from 2 December—the first of Morley’s many successful Australian visits.

After this came the Australian premiere of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire on 18 February 1950—appropriately enough a summer night of overpowering heat in the as yet un-airconditioned Comedy. American actor Arthur Franz starred as Stanley Kowalski in this rare venture by JCW into serious modern American drama which paid off with a run of more than three months.

Not quite as successful was Harvey, the American comedy that followed, despite the presence of famed wide-mouthed American film comedian Joe E. Brown. From 12 August The Firm took another gamble with a Doris Fitton production—an American musical fantasy called Dark of the Moon. Some six weeks later this made way for the hit of the year, the R.F. Delderfield wartime farce, Worm’s Eye View, which ran exactly six months from 30 September with British immigrants William Hodge and Gordon Chater in the casts.

Evelyn Laye in September Tide, 1951

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Kenneth Thornett and William Hodge in Seagulls Over Sorrento, 1953

Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne

British husband and wife stars Evelyn Laye and Frank Lawton began a four month season on 12 May 1951 in Daphne Du Maurier’s September Tide and John Van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle, F. Hugh Herbert’s comedy, The Moon is Blue, which followed, had a reputation for raciness at the time but was only moderately well received during its ten weeks from 14 September.

From 5 December 1951 the Comedy housed its first ever Shakespearian season when John Alden’s Australian company arrived with a repertoire beginning and ending with King Lear, which ran until 29 March 1952. The hit show of that year was Seagulls Over Sorrento, a farce by Australian author Hugh Hastings, which brought back William Hodge as star and chalked up 221 performances from 5 April, The Kiwis also returned after this and their two new revues again did excellent business, with a combined run of over six months to 24 April 1953.

Program cover for Dial M For Murder, Comedy Theatre. 1954

Theatre Heritage Australia

Advertising card for Reluctant Heroes, Comedy Theatre, 1953

Theatre Heritage Australia

Frederick Knott’s Dial M For Murder, gripped Comedy audiences for four months from 30 April and although Agatha Christie’s The Hollow, which came next, closed after five weeks, a third William Hodge hit followed this: Reluctant Heroes, another services farce, running seven months to 5 May 1954. The rest of that year saw Dear Charles, a comedy with Sophie Stewart and Clement McCallin, doing well with a run of over five months. But a revival of White Cargo and a new Australian play, Pommy (again with Bill Hodge) did poorly and the end of the year saw Hodge in the perennial Charley’s Aunt.

On 12 February 1955 Googie Withers and John McCallum made their first duo appearance in Australia in a comedy called Simon and Laura. They followed this on 14 May with Terence Rattigan’s drama, The Deep Blue Sea, ending this first of their many successful Comedy seasons on 9 July. A couple of American comedies that failed to draw preceded what many considered the artistic highlight of the year—Judith Anderson in her American success, Medea, on 20 December—the first presentation at the Comedy by the recently formed Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT).

Emrys Jones and Bettina Welch in Double Image, Comedy Theatre, 1956

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Program cover for The Chalk Garden, Comedy Theatre. 1957

Theatre Heritage Australia

Sailor Beware, another services farce, held the Comedy stage between 18 January and 5 May 1956 and on 12 June came a second AETT drama season lasting nine weeks, the highlight of which was a revival of the original production of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll with Lawler himself in the cast. British husband and wife Roger Livesey and Ursula Jeans starred in William Douglas Home’s comedy The Reluctant Debutante for over five months from 25 August 1956 while 4 February 1957 brought another successful expatriate, Leo McKern in The Rainmaker—although the play itself failed to please.

Nor did Janus the comedy which followed, despite the presence of British star Jessie Matthews, nor the next, Double Image, a thriller with British actor Emrys Jones. Although only introduced late in 1956, the popularity of television was already taking effect and the days of four or five month runs for often routine plays were coming to an end.

Another AETT presentation arrived on 23 July 1957: British actor Paul Rogers in Vanburgh’s The Relapse, and Hamlet, with a local cast including Zoe Caldwell as Ophelia, which played alternate weeks until 28 August. Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, with the distinguished Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, ran for over three months from 31 August. Not so fortunate for The Firm was a prize-winning local play, The Multi Coloured Umbrella, which had been a success when first produced at the Little Theatre but closed here after three weeks.

Lobby card advertising Luisillo and his Spanish Dance Theatre, Comedy Theatre, 1958

National Library of Australia, Canberra

Program cover for Nude with Violin, Comedy Theatre, 1958

Theatre Heritage Australia

An undisputed money-spinner was Luisillo and his Spanish Dance Theatre, beginning the first of several Comedy seasons on 11 March 1958. On 22 April another Australian play sponsored by the AETT, Richard Benyon’s The Shifting Heart was well received prior to a London production, with an eight week run to 18 June. Eight-week runs were also scored by expatriate star Robert Helpmann in Noël Coward’s Nude with Violin and Edwin Styles and Sophie Stewart in Not In the Book. The end of the year brought For Amusement Only, an English revue starring rising locals Toni Lamond, Tikki Taylor, John Newman and Frank Sheldon.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was revived for five weeks from 31 January 1959 and was followed by Googie Withers and John McCallum (now also The Firm’s assistant managing director) in Roar Like a Dove for nine weeks. John Alden’s Shakespeare company also returned on 12 June, with Scottish actor John Laurie as King Lear the highlight of the season, and on 12 September came the premiere of Ray Lawler’s new play, The Piccadilly Bushman. This failed to repeat the success of The Doll during its eight week run and the end of year attractions were British husband and wife Muriel Pavlow and Derek Farr in The Gazebo and Odd Man In for a total of three months to 23 February 1960.

In his autobiography, Life with Googie, John McCallum recalls working at the Comedy about this time in a ‘near-perfect set-up…for running a theatre circuit. Head office was on the second floor...with the Accounts department above it and Publicity below. Across the road was the flagship of the circuit, Her Majesty’s Theatre, behind which were the workshops and paint-frames, rehearsal rooms, wardrobe, laundry and dry cleaning, scene dock and stores... And so it was possible, in the course of a few minutes’ walk, to check on the exact state of any production in preparation.’

To be continued