Shepherd on the Rocks
By Patrick White
Playhouse, Festival Centre

In wanting to honour Patrick White on the occasion of his 75th birthday, the State Theatre Company did him little service by staging the world premiere of his recent play, Shepherd on the Rocks.

The story is based on the bizarre case from the Thirties of the Rector of Stifikey (pron. ‘Stookey ‘), the Rev Harold Davidson, an Anglican sky pilot with earthy ideas about his ministry. A former actor, and charismatic to a fault, he offered God’s grace in return for the favours of the fallen, the scarlet and the poor in spirit. He defied the wrath of the C-of-E even to the extent of turning up late to his own defrocking and, having become notorious, he campaigned openly, but unsuccessfully, to be reinstated.

It is undoubtedly a curious story, but neither Patrick White, director Neil Armfield, nor John Gaden, who plays the part of the Rev Daniel Shepherd, seem to have decided what its central issues really are, or why you’d want to write a play about them.

Ostensibly, Patrick White is interested in the unorthodoxy of the Davidson case and the vehement hypocrisy it revealed in the Church of England, the Fleet St press and the Edna Whelthorpes of English society of the time. But the fact remains that Davidson appears to have been a nutter whose dissemblance and hoaxes suggest the chaotic behaviour of a psychotic multiple personality. His life was riddled with details which certainly have the force of metaphor – he was exhibited at a fair next to a dead whale and he died entering a lions’ cage while performing at an amusement park in Skegness – but the story raises as many questions as it answers.

In Shepherd on the Rocks, names and details have been changed to vilify the culpable, but the play is confused about what, or who, might be the innocent. Director Armfield describes Shepherd on the Rocks as “fundamentally an Australian play about courage and honesty and, in Patrick’s words, ‘the varieties of faith”‘. Unfortunately, the play lacks courage and honesty and, for· the audience, engenders only a variety of disbelief.

This is scarcely the first time that the complacency and intolerance of the established church has been remarked upon. The Boulting Brothers film, Heavens Above, about a guileless parson scrupulously applying the logic of the Gospels in a starchy country parish, gave Peter Sellers one of his most bitterly satiric roles and, more recently, Michael Palin’s The Missionary gave the laying on of hands renewed meaning.

Shepherd on the Rocks is oddly dated when it tilts against windmills which have ceased to generate interest. That the Church has become marginal in the shaping of moral opinion and that it mistakes gentility for principle is not a revelation. Nor are we surprised to find that the police behave like criminals and the respectable are anything but.

What is perplexing is that Patrick White could have built his play around a totally unconvincing central character. As Rector of Budgiwank (!) in out-of-the-way NSW, Danny Shepherd, with his faithful wife, Tib, leads a sleepy little flock which, we see once our cleric has jumped on the train to Kings Cross, he is only too pleased to abandon. The simple life of the parish, as represented by Tib and retired deacon Tom Teasdale, is depicted as the endless droning of choruses of ‘Rock of Ages’.

The double life of the rector is presented with sour relish. Implausibly his sexual powers arouse even the most jaded jade, and his magnetism is such that his devotees troop back to Budgiwank just to be able to rub against his surplice.

Director, Neil Armfield, has taken White’s unwieldy and confusing narrative and tizzied it up with all the theatrics he can put his hand to. Armfield can be a splendid director but for some reason he has not chosen to take full command of this production. Instead, Brian Thomson’s lavish set is laid out like a cargo cult in the hope that something meaningful will arrive.

Armfield, again, uses the full expanse of the Playhouse stage, but most of the action tiptoes at the front of the stage or in Thomson’s large neon circle which, alas, fails to bring any magic charm to the piece. The massive neon crucifix and acres of billowing backdrop only amplify the lack of structure and purpose in the play.

As Danny Shepherd, John Gaden seems little short of desperate most of the time. It is distressing to see an actor of his calibre so much at sixes and sevens. The writing doesn’t help – he is asked to transmit the most woeful humour, hoary vaudeville and arch self-justifications but Gaden, himself, exacerbates matters by choosing such a hopped-up style for the shady Shepherd.

If Danny Shepherd is God’s fool in a harsh world, then he needs to have an inviolable innocence about him. His failure to recognise and harken to the conventions of hypocrisy should be the measure of his integrity, and his Blakean vision of love as divinely human and humanly divine. Instead, Gaden’s Shepherd is a devious buffoon who gulls his wife, writhes in self-serving melodrama (in an indescribable scene among the beached whales at Tiddlers’ Bay) and wades about in comic grotesqueries giving no sense of the validity of his beliefs or the tragedy of his ruin.

When be puts on the saintly sackcloth and rails against the false values of the world, (and, of course, the audience, since we are lumped in with the pharisees of Budgiwank) , it is so preachy and ill-judged that we are not at all sorry to see him become tucker for the lions.

ln other roles, Kerry Walker, as Queenie, the junkie, is the Tragic Woman of the Night but, as with much else in the play, we don’t feel a tiling. Wendy Harmer, as Tib, maintains a strong stage presence, finding a dignity and register that is little short of miraculous considering the lack of resonance in· her lines. Carole Skinner, uneasy as Lilly Thrip, the papist madam, finds more scope as Tilda Strutt the beachcomber with the pot of soup – another of Patrick White’s charladies with a heart of gold and mystical proclivities.

Geoffrey Rush as Archbishop Bigge is a triumph of latex engineering with Salieri make-up right down to the ropey veins in his neck. His performance as a withered despiser of life and vitality is nicely spiked with well-timed funny business in conspiracy with Henri Szeps as the unctuous Dean Shute. Both acquit themselves well, as does Peter Crossley as Errol Dick, the detective. He is malevolent, like a dark force from a morality play.

It is obvious that Shepherd on the Rocks is not intended to be a naturalistic play; ‘that grotesques, stereotypes, symbols, metaphors and significances are meant to everywhere abound. But Armfield needed to push everything further into expressionistic cauchemar if Shepherd is to have any impact – and, even then, Danny Shepherd must be exempted, moving through the play like an ingenue so that the final scene in the circus of the world can be seen vividly as a mad zoo where even though tenderness and compassion get devoured by beasts, we are beasts if we don’t believe in them.

White has a harsh, misanthropic vision and he has not imbued Danny Shepherd sufficiently with a countervailing presence. If Shepherd is, as Patrick White suggested to the first night audience, a vehicle for his views, it is surprising .be has not made him more of a force to be reckoned with.

Shepherd on the Rocks founders because it has no convictions. The central character is a series of impersonations and· the supporting characters mere vehicles for Patrick White’s sentimentality and contempt. No amount of stage wizardry can conceal this and John Gaden’s discomfort as the lead only confirms it.

That the play is not a success is not the end of the world nor a reflection on Patrick White’s unassailable reputation as a writer. But it is cause for regret that so much talent has been arrayed to so little purpose.

Murray Bramwell

CentreStage Australia, June, 1987, pp.18-19.