Jordan Best is playing Olive in Pigeonhole Theatre's next production, the 1955 Ray Lawler play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Having previously played Blanche in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire she thinks both the character and the play are fully worthy to stand beside the American masterwork.

"It's Australia's classic, really," she says.

"Olive is such a beautiful character. For me, having played Blanche in Streetcar, I feel Olive is Australia's Blanche."

The play is set in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton in the summer of 1953. For the past 16 years, two men, Barney (played by Dene Kermond) and Roo (Craig Alexander) have spent seven months working as cane cutters in Queensland and then come back to Melbourne for five months of partying and romance with their girlfriends, who work as barmaids. Roo has always brought his girl, Olive, a kewpie doll as a gift.

But this 17th summer is different. Barney's former girlfriend, Nancy, has married a man in the city.

"She wanted security," Best says.

"Olive invites another woman to stay for the summer to be a potential friend for Barney."

That woman, Pearl (Andrea Close), is also a barmaid and a widow with an 18-year-old daughter.

"Olive is keen to keep the magic alive of the summers," Best says. She and the two men do their best - and so does Olive's mother, Emma (Liz Bradley), but nothing this 17th summer is the same as it was.

One of the themes of the play, Best says, is how things change as you get older, in more ways than one.

"Roo is the boss, the ganger of their crew, and they're getting older - late 30s, early 40s - with young people coming up, fitter and stronger.

"Olive doesn't want things to change, she wants things to stay the same."

Best says Olive is often played as a sort of child living in a fantasy world, but she doesn't think that's her at all. She points that Olive supports herself for seven months of the year, working as a barmaid, an occupation that requires a certain amount of savvy. Then for five months she gets to be with the man she loves and have fun with him - in a relationship that some might view as not being very respectable - before going back to being independent.

"She and Roo love each other - they're faithful. Barney is a total playboy - he has kids all over the place."

But whether their relationship will survive the changes and revelations as the play unfolds remains to be seen.

Best says Doll is "so perfectly constructed and beautifully written and so thoroughly Australian" - and, unusually for a play of its period, it's neither misogynistic nor racist. It became a big hit in Australia and an international success (often with a glossary included to explain its Australian lingo). It was co-produced in London by Laurence Olivier and made into a 1959 film starring Anne Baxter, Angela Lansbury, Ernest Borgnine and John Mills.

It's a long way - in several respects - from the company's most recent endeavour, travelling to Monaco to present its debut production, Playhouse Creatures, at an international festival. That 1993 April De Angelis play, about the first English actresses to take the stage in 17th-century London, has one thing in common with the Australian work - some excellent roles for women.

Best and her husband Jim Adamik, also directed by Vickery, presented excerpts from Doll at the National Portrait Gallery in 2015 to mark the play's 60th anniversary.

"I didn't know I was going to do this," she says.

"A lot of people said, 'You should do the full play'."

And now, with Pigeonhole, she has, bringing the Australian masterpiece about "love, life and getting older" to Canberra audiences.