The days are for revolution, the nights are for love
North Queensland Communist Party slogan of the 1930s
Stuck in central Victoria due to misreading a timetable, I came back through Mansfield, two days after hearing about Ray Lawler’s death. Age of 103. One hundred and three. He had just kept on, down there in Elwood on the bay in Melbourne. I was poking around the town as you do, or as I do, looking at the white pillar of the war memorial, the credits as much as the deaths, the “created by public subscription”, the mayor, the etc.
The tops of the shops, Davies’ buildings, 1924, sans serif letters on a racy Art Deco crest. Would have stocked menswear, groceries, confectioners, the shops cycling through the decades in fast motion, whole lives rising and falling. Doing the numbers, feeling the basic occult sense that everyone who would have been here for its grand opening, the suits and hats, the gleaming curves of the cars and the bunting, is now long dead, and then realising that, until a week ago, Ray Lawler was of that age and still here.
The playwright who made what remains the tightest, most exact piece of theatre writing in the not-very-large Australian canon A-list, the purest, pared-down expression of the structure underpinning tragedy, lived on long past any mark that would give his public life a three-act structure. Truly, God is an absurdist.
I was grousing in my mind about the obits, all of them clicking off the plays after Summer of the Seventeenth Doll with no real sense of what a comedown it all was, the misfire of the follow-up, Piccadilly Bushman, the late obscure works, and above all the two prequels written in the ’70s to make up the Doll trilogy, a shot at an Australian epic falling far short, how it never took, and there, in the window of the newsagent — soon to close — in this frozen country town, and the reason for this long excursus, was an ad for the local am dram players’ latest. Kid Stakes by Ray Lawler, a photo of the cast assembled before loaned antique furniture, kitted out in vintage wear. Well, there you goddam go. They found something playable in it.
The playability’s the thing. What makes The Doll part of the 20th-century world canon — if only the world knew — is its inexhaustible playability. Its initial success and persistence are not simply because it put ordinary Australians of the time on stage. In fact it was part of a large working-class theatre and literature movement, which has lost its visibility as class has faded in importance and they become, in the rearview mirror, documents of whiteness.
The Doll soared above the material around it — only the short stories of John Morrison, small masterpieces, are its equal — because Lawler put his all into it, taking it, it is said, to more than 30 drafts, writing it in the cafeteria of the Melbourne University Student Union building (soon to be demolished by vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell, the salmonella man), writing not writing as it should be. But the other reason is that the play is so damn sexy. It is that near self-parodic thing, a masterpiece of Australian eroticism.
Consider the plot for a moment. Olive and Pearl are waiting in Carlton for their men, Roo and Barney, to come back from the Queensland cane fields for their seven-month, aptly named, layover. Except, of course, Roo and Barney aren’t their men. Pearl is a replacement for Nancy — the original, and never seen, fourth member of the quartet — who has decided that after 16 years of this enjoyable malarkey, it’s over, and has married a Melbourne drone. So Olive has swapped in Pearl, her barmaid colleague. On the principle of what? That a man is a man and a woman a woman? Does it really matter that much who you’re with? Pearl makes some early protests about seeing how it goes, which no-one in the audience believes for a second. No, this is on. That is a rather louche notion for today, let alone the 1950s. It is anti-sentimental, anti-romantic, the raw of life got.
That’s one big element that gives The Doll its playability. The working-class writing of the time was about work above all, and how your life was shaped around it, how it made you over, the wharves, the factories, the meagre dole, the piecework. But Roo and Barney are free. They trade half a year of gruelling tropical work for a half year of freedom. The play’s lineage is thus as much Chekhov as Ibsen or O’Neill. The quartet are aristocrats in their Carlton terrace estate, free to do nothing but relate to each other, and to life, and to time. The question hangs in the air. With Pearl and Olive still working at the pub, what do Roo and Barney do all day? How many times can you go to the races, the beach, the pub, Luna Park, the flickers, the Tivoli? The play thus gains an existential dimension, and then a tragic one.
There is nothing to be done with life, and there is no escaping time, moved on little fidget wheels, the flood that does not flow. The three minor female characters — Olive’s aged mum Emma, the young 22-year-old Kathie nicknamed “Bubba” from the house next door, and the absent Nancy — are the three Fates, attending the fall of the main characters. Any director who can’t get something out of this should go work in a paint shop.
You can play The Doll straight, you can play up the sex, you can play up the longueurs, you can do it period kitsch, you can do it as tragedy out of time. You can centre it on any of the four main characters, who can all be done in a dozen different ways. You can emphasise the minor characters, who each have a little extra beyond their necessary function. Johnnie Dowd, the young cane cutter who Roo and Barney meet up with in Melbourne, is a little faster than them, a little less sentimental. Bubba, having watched the whole set-up from childhood, is harder-edged than Pearl or Olive, knows what she wants, is a harbinger of the sexual revolution to come when this arrangement won’t be anything special at all. Olive and Roo’s doll arrangement is coming apart because the world in which it was made, in which it was furtive, half-acceptable in some circles, will soon itself be coming apart.
The Doll lacks the demented internal logic of O’Neill, the neurotic obsessiveness of William Inge, and the soaring bullshit bravado of Tennessee Williams, but that’s what makes it work. Much of Lawler’s work in those umpteen drafts must have been pulling out the baroque and overwrought, killing his doll-darlings. What he got was a play that has some affinities with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a play designed to be playable by anyone, anywhere. The Doll isn’t that ham-proof, but it is very durable. I’ve seen a few amateur productions of it; they always seem to find their way to the centre of it, to rock it into motion, in any draughty church hall.
However, whether you can do that in Hamer Hall, in this time, is another question. I suspect The Doll is now better played in black t-shirts, with a single Genoa armchair on stage, or by am dram doing their best among a stage loaded with bric-a-brac, rather than the full costume drama on a main stage. It’s possible it doesn’t scale up anymore. But this presupposes the major companies have much interest in building and maintaining an Australian theatre canon, which is clearly in question. Lawler’s efforts — not only in writing The Doll but also in creating the company that would ultimately become the Melbourne Theatre Company — were to ground an Australian theatre tradition that escaped the bounds of either the occasional commercial homegrown go, or the narrower political focus of the left theatre.
You wouldn’t want to underestimate the man’s lust for glory, a pretty necessary prerequisite for writing 30 drafts of anything. He went to London in the ’50s and stayed through the ’60s — when you could make a good living writing plays (plays!) for UK television — thus breaking a continuity between the left theatre he came from and the next, and greater, eruption of it in the late ’60s, with La Mama and the Pram Factory in Melbourne, and the Stables and Old Tote in Sydney.
Much of the material of that period has become challenging, as work to be revived, to say the least. Theatre turns on changing obsessions more than any of the arts, and the obsession of the ’60s and ’70s was a left cultural nationalism in which an Anglo society was trying to work out how it could extricate itself from the old dominance of the British Empire and the coming dominance of American coca-colonisation.
For those on the left, that liberation included Black/Indigenous liberation — there was less attention to non-Anglos arrivals, with some exceptions* — but it’s harder to see that from this vantage point. To break out of British stage gentility, the clipped style and pronunciation of the endless touring and local production of London farces and New York musicals, the local style took Oz slang and the larrakin attitude to the max and beyond into surreal invention. That was pretty Anglo and masculinist at the time (as shown by Kath Kenny’s Staging A Revolution, about the first women’s collective play of the time, it was seen as such). It looks off the charts these days, and some of that work would have to be played, inflected as period. Another reason to appreciate.
But there are playable plays, and they’re not being played. Why? Public taste has moved on from main-stage, script-heavy theatre to some degree. But so too has theatrical production pushed the writer to the back and the director to the fore. The role of the interpretive director — a thankless task of dissolving yourself into someone else’s performance of someone else’s script, success being the disappearance of any explicit trace of your contribution whatsoever — arose in commercial theatre as a way of getting the damn thing on. It acquired an artistic dimension, and when it leapt over into art, the director began to become a playmaker, using texts, or part thereof, as raw material. For Australian theatre, that has since become a Thorne-y weed, choking off the life of the tradition. The abnegating work of staging the canon needs to be done. We must have legends, lest we die of strangeness.
So what’s playable from that last crop? It’s not always the best or most striking play of the time. The more a quality play observes unity of place, time and action, the greater chance it has of being durable. The Doll stretches time over a summer. But it’s one summer, no flashbacks, all happening in one living room, and, if it works, the heat comes off it into the auditorium. So what else works? Some are obvious and have had their revival. David Williamson’s The Removalists is one. The Coming of Stork would have to be played as farcical self-parody of the period, at breakneck speed. Don’s Party bogs down a little in the middle, as 30s-somethings assess their wild youth. The Club would need a heavy expressionist touch, done like an East European play, with a bit of clipping down.
For my money, the missing play is Williamson’s The Department, a from-life record of the squalor of life in the Swinburne Institute of Technology engineering department in the 1970s (where Williamson, in case you couldn’t tell from his work, was an engineering-psychology dual major). Again, with an expressionist do-over. Its study of limited men of the time has become a study of how a technological society creates an autistic culture. Who else? Alma De Groen’s Rivers of China gets a run — a transcendentally weird piece mixing dystopian sci-fi and the last months of Katherine Mansfield’s life, a play a long way ahead of its time. But more playable is a stageable TV play called After Marcuse: it’s indulgent — about a woman playwright dealing with insane ’70s men — but once again, it’s the playability.
There are characters, exchanges to be made something out of. Jack Hibberd, most neglected by recent history — A Stretch of the Imagination aside — one is least worried out. There will be a third rediscovery of Hibberd eventually, and people will see that he went the furthest of anyone in creating something distinct out of Australianism and modernism. Half a dozen of his works could, should, be revived. John Romeril. Not The Floating World, which is a bit mid now, but The Man From Chicago and I Don’t Know Who to Feel Sorry For, strange, paranoid, sinister pieces that would match the times again. Stephen Sewell The Father We Loved On a Beach By The Sea. Jack Davis.
It’s a measure of how great the wilful forgetting of, and disdain for, the past that Indigenous playwrights aren’t being revived to establish a continuity. Alex Buzo is the toughest nut to crack, surviving through Norm and Ahmed, an extended sketch that connects well with high school lessons about tolerance. For a while he lived on through Coralie Lansdowne Says No, its conventional plot saved by the brilliance of its language — “It’s like trying to drink Fanta through an eel” — but I reckon that no longer works.
Martello Towers, a ’70s Sydney trendies French farce-satire, could be redone as an exaggerated period piece, all shagpile and flares (with a bit of rewriting by someone, anyone, to remove Buzo’s stubborn insistence that a farce could become a serious social meditation seven-eighths of the way through. I read it when I was 19. Even I could see that was dumb). But it’s his three later plays — Big River, Makassar Reef and The Marginal Farm — that really deserve a reexamination.
An attempt to encompass Australia’s federation, and position in Asia, these are actually post-colonial plays, written by a man who might well have hated that. Someone needs to have another look. Attention, attention must be paid. And we haven’t even spoken of Sydney Tomholt, Australia’s first avant-garde playwright, whose collected works are a single volume of one-act plays, staged in the ’30s and ’40s, far from genius, but two or three are worth a go.
Producers and directors will say it’s too difficult, things have shifted around too much. But, well, as theatre makers, it’s kind of your job to try and make these texts live again. It’s a lot easier to program a company with a mix of musicals made out of films, cut-ups of Shakespeare by directors out to improve him, decolonising Noël Coward, and German Shrieking sponsored by Armani in the Blanchett Studio. That’s cutting cane with the grain. The harder thing is to make something out of where you are, and how we were. Ray Lawler spent 30 drafts doing it, and his is the bounty, such as it is, that people will still gather on the frozen plains, amid the stone memorials, to say the words and mean something by them, and thereby be meant.
* Richard Beynon’s The Shifting Heart, about the racism and hostility suffered by migrants moving into those same terraces, was a hit in the late 1950s, and did better in London than The Doll. Alas, it does not escape the limits of kitchen-sink style and is now of historic interest.
