Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs One of Australia’s most celebrated playwrights, Melbourne writer, actor and director Ray Lawler, has died at the age of 103.A giant of Australian theatre, Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was a huge hit around Australia when the play premiered in 1955, before touring to London to widespread acclaim.Melbourne playwright Ray Lawler in 2011.Credit: Anthony JohnsonIn 1957, it won the Evening Standard Award for best new play on the London stage. In 1959, it was made into a film starring Ernest Borgnine and Angela Lansbury.The Doll was originally staged by the Union Theatre Repertory Company in 1955, with Lawler playing the central character of Barney, a Queensland cane cutter.LoadingIt was not the only play written by Lawler, who was born in Footscray in 1921. He wrote many more, and by the time it premiered The Doll was the eighth that he had penned – but it was by far the most successful. It was also one of the first plays to unashamedly bring Australia’s working-class vernacular to the stage, and has since been lauded as among the nation’s greatest works of theatre.Its characters “Barney, Roo, Pearl and Emma are real people,” critic Biddy Allen wrote in The Argus in 1955. “We know their faces, their voices – we share their dreams, we understand their failures.”Lawler, along with John Sumner, in 1953 founded the Union Theatre Repertory Company, which would later become Melbourne Theatre Company. The MTC has since named one of its stages – the intimate performance space The Lawler at the Southbank Theatre – after him.Theatre director and former Adelaide Festival co-director Neil Armfield paid tribute to Lawler on Instagram on Friday night.
