The Doll

(tt) Ray Lawler' classic play, "The Summer of t he Seventeen Doll" is being presented by Belvoir St, directed by Neil Armfield, with a superlative cast in a breathtaking production.

My date was the gorgeous Mitchell Butel

Here we thank Russell Crowe for being in Los Angeles

The play, though set in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne, could easily have been imagined for the Surry Hills area and Neil has used a brilliant device of cutting a window into the external wall of the theatre allowing the onstage characters to yell into the street and receive cries back from below. Here's the window from the street

And here is a pub in the area  which could easily have been the haunt of Roo and Barney in their layoffs from sugar cane cutting back in those 1940's and 50' summers.

When you buy a ticket to see "The Doll" you know you are going to go on an amazing journey into sadness but you never realise til it happens how gut wrenching that journey is.  Does Barney really smash the last kewpie doll 17 times til it lies beside the piano in pieces?