State Opera: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

State Opera returns to the new-look Her Majesty’s Theatre this November with an operatic take on the Aussie icon Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

Ray Lawler’s famed play was re-imagined for the operatic stage by composer Richard Mills and literary icon Peter Goldsworthy in the mid 1990s and will receive its third ever season as part of State Opera’s Lost Operas of Oz initiative – which champions Australian operas worthy of a contemporary audience.

Set in working class 1950s Melbourne Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is the story of a long-standing summer fling between cane-cutters Barney and Roo and two city girls. But after seventeen years the larrikin charm and carefree summers of their youth have begun to fade. Instead their reunion is full of tension silence and awkward attempts to hold onto their past. All of them struggle to come to terms with what their futures hold.