Theatre
This Old Man Comes Rolling Home
Dorothy Hewett · 1967
Synopsis
In Redfern, a working-class district of Sydney, in the early fifties, the play follows six months in the life of the Dockertys. Laurie, the mother, who drinks, still dreams of the time when she was called the most beautiful girl in Bundaberg; pregnant by the charming Tom, she had married him out of necessity, and thirty years later their son Lan and his friend Edie find themselves in the same situation. Around the other children come pregnancies, a theft, arrests, the loss of a job. A chorus of three old women and an old man sitting on a bench comment on the action.
Context
Written in 1965, its author's first full-length play, it draws on the years she spent in Redfern, from 1949 to 1952; the Dockertys come from a family on her street, and a first version had been destroyed in 1958. It was premiered from 11 to 21 January 1967 at the New Fortune Theatre of the University of Western Australia, in Perth, by the university drama society, then staged by the Old Tote of Sydney on 19 March 1968, the first play by a woman directed by a woman in that theatre. The text was published in 1976 by Currency Press.
Who it is for
A play in English, at once naturalistic and poetic, with a chorus; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
The critic Harry Kippax left the Sydney première, judging the play old-fashioned; yet it has been revived as late as 2018.
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