Australian playwright, dramatist, actor, producer and director Ray Lawler recently passed away at the grand old age of 103. We send our condolences to his family and friends, while celebrating the incredible legacy of an Australian arts pioneer and his foundational contributions to The National Theatre Movement in the 1940s and 50s.
The following recollections of Ray Lawler’s time with The National are from Frank Van Straten’s book National Treasure: The Story of Gertrude Johnson and the National Theatre.
In 1945, “The National Theatre celebrated the end of the war with a new Australian play, Hal’s Belles. This was the work of a twenty-four-year-old aspiring man of the theatre called Raymond Lawler.” The production also marked the stage debut of Frank Thring – the son of Frank Thring Snr who was jointly responsible for the creation of The Victory Theatre (now the National) in 1921 and a key player in the establishment of Hoyts cinemas Australia.
Ray appeared in many National Theatre productions including The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1946) and Twelfth Night (1949).
Following the success of the National’s 1951 Arts Festival, Gertrude Johnson and William P Carr established a permanent professional National Theatre Drama Company, with Ray Lawler as one of the six original company artists. In 1951, Ray appeared in The Importance of Being Earnest and later that year he devised, wrote and directed a pantomime version of St George and the Dragon for the Christmas holidays.
The 1952 Arts Festival included Ray’s Cradle of Thunder, written in 1949. “It had won a recent National Theatre Australia-wide competition and was thought by its author to be ‘only the tenth straight play by an Australian author produced on the professional stage in Australia in the past thirty-five years’.”
The year ended with two pieces by Ray Lawler; The Bluff and the Fair, a reworking of Hal’s Belles and The Adventures of Ginger Meggs for the 1952 Christmas holidays. “Agnes Fulton wrote the music and Ray Lawler wrote the libretto and lyrics – and played the role of Ginger too! Frank Doherty in the Argus (newspaper) thought Lawler had paid the perfect complement to Jimmy Bancks, Ginger Meggs’ creator, who had died a few months before.”
On 3 June 1953, “on behalf of the Victorian government, the National theatre marked the Queen’s Coronation with a spectacular Pageant of Royalty at the Exhibition Building. Ray Lawler wrote the script and Bill Carr directed. Over 1000 people took part in the eighteen elaborate sequences. Gertrude later crowed, ‘the artistic achievement of that epic is now history’.”
Also in 1953, Patricia Kennedy appeared in The National Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, under Ray Lawler’s direction.
Patricia Kennedy: That was one of the last things Ray did for the National Theatre. I think that while we were working on it, he started going to the library to write Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Cradle of Thunder
Set image (1952)