Raymond Evenor Lawler AO OBE, 23 May 1921–24 July 2024
Ray Lawler in 1955, photographed by Henry Talbot. State Library Victoria, Melbourne.Ray Lawler, the author of one of Australia’s finest plays (and arguably its most culturally significant), has died, at the great age of 103.
What a difference he made, to Australian theatre, and to the unapologetic celebration of a distinctively Australian voice.
This brief appreciation will focus on the nature and significance of that difference, and an acknowledgement of personal indebtedness, rather than on yet another homage to Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. There have been quite a few of those over the years—some by me, going way back to After ‘The Doll’: Australian Drama since 1955, which I published in 1979; most recently, I wrote an extended retrospective on The Doll for Theatre Heritage Australia in September 2021, to mark Lawler’s one hundredth birthday, which is still discoverable in the THA archives. That was a study of the themes of the play—the explicit treatment of gender stereotype and suburban morality, and the perhaps less conscious depiction of a society at a point of transition; even in 1955, the play contained a strong element of nostalgia as its quaintly Anglo parochialism was being transformed outside the theatre by the first wave of Italian migration that would make Carlton a very different inner suburb from the one that Emma knew so well (or the Footscray in which her author had grown up). Lawler’s play caught and preserved the charm of a shared vernacular (what it means to ‘poke mullock’ for instance, or to act like a ‘Jimmy Woodser’) just as it was about to disappear.
You could argue the same (as I did) for the mode and structure of the play; it looks back fondly to classic three-act fixed-set naturalism, with all the primary virtues of closely-observed character and tightly-controlled small-group interactions that are fundamental to the form when it’s working very well. But the times were changing. If 28 November 1955 at Melbourne’s Union Theatre was a watershed evening in Australian theatre, there had been a night a few months earlier at the Arts Theatre in London that was every bit as big for the theatre of Britain and Europe, with the revolutionary first English-language production of Waiting for Godot.
If it was hardly theatrically cutting-edge, however, The Doll was just a brilliant conception. Those kewpie dolls. That evocation of summer nights on the porch. The exploration of the symbolic associations of place, as steamy Far North Queensland comes down to energise grimy working-class Melbourne. The deeply sympathetic understanding of each character’s distinctive approach to the need to feel loved, and to construct a life they could believe was something special. There were layers of mystery in each of them, as there are in real people; enough, it turned out, to generate a couple of prequels, Kid Stakes and Other Times, two decades on—though the driving presence in both those plays was the person who isn’t there in The Doll, Nancy, whose absence is such a palpable element of the primary work.
The Doll was a hard act to follow, of course—and not just for its prequels. Though The Piccadilly Bushman explored Australian expatriatism with a keen sense of what it could be like to fall between cultures, and The Man Who Shot the Albatross is among the most elegantly-crafted of Australian historical dramas, Lawler remained, frustratingly, something of a one-hit wonder. He lived for nearly seventy years beyond that relatively early triumph, and it’s not hard to imagine how difficult that must have been; writers tend mostly to believe that their best work is the one they’re just about to write, and it must have been galling for Lawler when each new creative venture suffered the inevitable unfavourable comparisons with his biggest hit.
This is one of the things that inclined me to a personal, rather than critical, response to Lawler’s death. I feel a strong sense of obligation to him—as a theatre academic, and subsequently as a writer. As an Australian, too, even a Melburnian—Ray Lawler blazed a number of trails for a number of people like me. It’s not as if we had an actual relationship across the generations—I met him twice only, I think, at a time when he was around the age I am now (and seemed, accordingly, almost inconceivably old). His manner was modest and unassuming—an uncommon, and excellent, thing to find in a writer you admire. But that quality of reserve meant that Lawler—like the characters he invented—rarely put all his cards on the table, and always retained an element of the unknown. He was an accomplished actor, too, after all.
So questions like how Lawler felt about relatively early fame and a subsequent career that could never be quite successful enough, how he felt about the support of John Sumner’s Melbourne Theatre Company and its campaign to mythologise him, and his reaction to the eventual realisation that he had nothing more to offer, raise important issues about being a writer; they humanise him, as well, and make him a subject of interest not just for his one-off achievement as a pioneer and cultural ambassador, but as a man who lived a long life in, or adjacent to, the theatre, and who experienced the disappointments that go with that territory. Yes, as a number of the eulogies in recent weeks have claimed, he was “an icon”. But he was also a working writer, possibly compulsive, whose career might not just inspire but represent the careers of a lot of others.
My feelings at hearing of his death were odd. It seems a little irrational to grieve when a batsman goes out after completing his century; most of us will never get there. But I felt a sense of indebtedness to Ray Lawler. He was totally unaware of it, of course, but that’s the point.
I owe him thanks, as do many others, for writing a play rich enough for us to write about often and at length. I owe him thanks, as do many others, for demonstrating so conclusively that the Australian idiom could express or imply emotions of great power, subtlety and complexity. I owe him thanks, as do many others, for establishing that a cluttered room in Australian suburbia could provide the location for a story of universal dimensions.
For all of that—thank you, Ray Lawler.
