Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Composer's use their distinctive voices to explore their ideas about humanity, revealing the unvarnished truths of idealism and change. In Lawler’s play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, considered ground-breaking for its distinctive use of Australian colloquial language and idiom, along with its unique depiction of Australian working class characters and experiences, highlights the dangers of excessive idealism and the failure to accept change and the rigors of time. While Omar Musa’s “Capital Letters” at TEDxSydney, verbalises the voice of the often overlooked and marginalised within Australian society. Playwrights such as Ray Lawler use their distinctive voices in texts to create characters that Expose the dangers of excessive idealism. This is…

effects. In the 1955 play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Australian playwright Ray Lawler, depicts how changes to our everyday life force us to re-evaluate who we are and what our future holds. Whether that change comes to group dynamics; or with age, we have to reconsider our dreams, our aspirations and relationships. Similarly, Robert Frost in his poem Nothing Gold Can Stay explores the concept of trying to grasp the brevity of beauty and the inevitability of change, and how it only brings…

What is it like to be an average Australian teenager, growing up in Melbourne? David Metzenthen’s Jarvis 24 is a teenage fiction novel satiric to adolescence, dealing with the complication of growing up, amidst a vivid and poignant Melbourne setting. The story places the reader in the mind of high school student, Marc Jarvis, who is a worrywart and tends to lose things. He got himself a one week work experience placement at Gateway Auto, a local second-hand car yard owned by Vincent Gates…

The play, “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” by Ray Lawler is mainly a story about life of Australia in the 1950s. In the play, one sees that, Lawler gives audiences rich insights into various aspects of gender issues and cultural identity issues typical of Australian life set in that period of time. The play talks about a group of ordinary people who are struggling to stay young as do not acknowledge the reality that they are aging. In their desperate bid to escape the inevitability of the…

Summer at Tiffany’s by Marjorie Hart is a true story that takes place in the year 1945 about two young girls who travel from the Kappa House of Iowa to find work in New York City for the summer. Marjorie Hart and her best friend Mary Garrett are accepted into a job at Tiffany’s as sales floor workers. This may not sound like much, but to Marjorie and Marty, this was the most incredible thing to ever happen. A real dream come true. They were the first women to ever have a job in a department…

Australian play and quickly gained approval and recognition from critics everywhere, as one critic put it, “The death of the old and stupid notion that Australians could never write a worth while play” (Milne, 2004, p. 52) Renowned for its uniquely Australian voice, and universal themes while also highlighting upon the masculinist images so popular in 1950’s Australian culture Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, allowed Australian city life and bush legends to successfully come to the stage with…

theatre history can separated into two notable periods, first from the 1950s to 70s and, mid 80s and beyond. The 1950s was an auspicious period within Australian theatre history, where we saw the appointment of Ray Lawler as the director of the Union Theatre Repertory Company, presently The Melbourne Theatre Company, and the establishment of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Various theatre companies began to appear on a national scale in the following years (Bollen, Kiernander, & Parr,…

Introducing the Kiowas in history, their traditions are able to tell us how they entered the world and how they lived a hard life. In the late seventeenth century, they migrated southward. The Kiowas acquired horses and also Tai-me, which was their sacred sun dance doll. In the map 6.3 in the textbook, it shows us the Kiowa migration route from 1832-1869 and that they migrated south across the Great Plains. Although they were brought to new homes, they encountered with the Americans and this…

development, presentation and promotion of Australian Theatre as an essential part of Australian cultural life. Our purpose is to create theatre that speaks to and on behalf of our community through telling stories that call contextualise and comment upon our lived experience. (in Coman, 2007) These intentions and vision were shaped during the eight years that Mee worked as the Artistic Director. Under Mee’s Artistic Directorship there were ‘three pillars’ put into place as a guide for the works…