English Standard

In the Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) Australian playwright Ray Lawler shows the audience how changing experiences and circumstances often force us to reconsider who we are and our vision of ourselves and our future. When Pearl replaces Nancy, and Johnny replaces Roo; Olive, Roo and Barney all have to deal with changes to who they are and how they see themselves. Accepting change in order to grow can change who you are as a person or what you see for the rest of your life. They have to deal with how they wish to relate to each other and on what terms. They have to face the evaporation of their youthful dreams and have to reconsider their goals, illusions, relationships and priorities in life, whatever the challenge. The failure to amend and adapt has serious consequences for our happiness and wellbeing which has transpired to all of the three main characters in the play; Olive, Roo and Barney.  
Olive is the main protagonist who has been affected the most by change. Nancy getting married and leaving the group, Roo getting a painting job during their summer and Barney and Roo having disagreements has altered the way things used to be with Olive and her friends. She is stuck in a world between her dreams and the reality in which she doesn’t want to comprehend. She wants everything to be the same as it was the years before, as she angrily cries ‘I want what I had before.’ and it hasn’t struck her that things are different now. Olive deals with change by not accepting it. She refuses to have anything to do with Nancy or the wedding and bringing pearl to replace her, ‘you’re a bit alike, you two…somethin’ in the way you look.’   Thus, she assumes that things will continue as they have always done in the past, because she has found a replacement for Nancy and a new partner for Barney. Olive’s push through the early part of the play is a desperate nostalgic re-enactment of the first, second, third, fourth summers when Roo would bring her a kewpie doll. It...