From the canefields to the city, an iconic Australian story of passion, bittersweet romance and the yearning for lost youth.

Directed by Denny Lawrence

A beautifully observed, humorous and poignant play, Ray Lawler’s much loved tale of two Queensland cane cutters who for 16 years have worked up north in the brutal sugar cane fields and travelled back to Melbourne to meet up for five months of partying and romance with their barmaid girlfriends.

This seventeenth summer everything is different.  One of the barmaids has ‘settled down’ and married a city bloke so a replacement date has to be found. This ‘off-season’ proves challenging for them all.

Plays and playwrights go in and out of fashion but some endure and speak to each subsequent generation.  Lawler’s much loved tale has endured, not through nostalgia, nor because it spawned a new age in Australian writing, but because the characters and their dilemmas are so true, so beautifully observed, so humorous and so poignant.

A triumph at its 1955 Melbourne premiere, and highly successful West End season.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” provides a rare and theatrically realistic glimpse into an Australian working-class psyche that is not simply from the past but is still ever-present.”  City News