He asks Roo to join him, but Roo says he's staying put, and that he won't be back for the cane-cutting either, because he's decided to get a steady job in the city and ask Olive to marry him. Downer Ending: Following a day where every attempt to patch things up just makes matters worse, Pearl declares she's had enough and leaves, prompting Barney to decide to cut his holiday short and go off fruit-picking until the cane-cutting season begins again.The play was also adapted into a 1996 opera with music by Richard Mills and libretto by Peter Goldsworthy. Tensions mount, and when the summer is over nothing will ever be the same again.Ī film adaptation was released in 1959, directed by Leslie Norman and starring Ernest Borgnine as Roo, Anne Baxter as Olive, John Mills as Barney and Angela Lansbury as Pearl.

When Roo and Barney arrive, they reveal that they've had a bad season Roo has no money saved up, and their friendship is under stress because they parted ways over how to handle a situation in their cutting crew. Olive has invited another friend, Pearl, to make up the numbers, but she's not sure she's going to fit in.

Nancy is absent she got married during the year, and not to Barney. For all of them, Olive especially, it's an annual highlight that makes the rest of the year worthwhile. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is an Australian play by Ray Lawler, first performed in 1955.įor sixteen years Roo, Barney, Olive and Nancy have been spending each summer together in the same house, when Roo and Barney come into the city to spend the money they've made working the rest of the year as itinerant cane cutters.

Summer of the seventeenth doll play