"Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll" is a timeless play as it can be transposed to be as relevant today as when it was written. The play is definitely a tragi-comedy but more than the ideas raised in the statement the play is about change and the inability for some to deal with it, the battle between dream and reality and loyalty and mateship. It also serves as a social document of Australia in the 1950s. Lawler uses symbols, the actions of the characters, the structure of the play and mise-en-scene to effectively portray his feelings to the audience.

The main theme expressed in the play is change and the characters' inability to cope with this. Like many working-class people from this time the characters in the play are fairly uneducated and because of this, they do not have an understanding of the growing old process, they cling onto...