murraybramwell.com

June 01, 1987

Ham Funeral

Shepherd on the Rocks
by Patrick White
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

Patrick White’s plays have a long association with Adelaide from the controversial first season of The Season at Sarsparilla to the more recent Lighthouse productions which revealed Netherwood and hailed Signal Driver. All that history notwithstanding, the State Theatre Company’s decision to stage Shepherd on the Rocks was an unfortunate one. The production does little credit to either White or the company, and, all things considered, they would have paid the writer more fitting tribute on: the occasion of his 75th birthday by reviving one of his earlier plays.

Shepherd on the Rocks is based, more or less, on actual events – the infamous case of the Reverend Harold Davidson, rector of Stiffkey (pron. Stookey), an Anglican.cleric in England in the 1930s, who in believing amor vincit omnia, wasn’t too fussy about whether it was the divine or the human variety, since in his GoodBook, his· parish duties extended· to the demi-monde of Soho, where he held unorthodox communion with his converts. The C of E, believing as it used to in a swift and terrible God, charged the Rev. Davidson with immoral conduct, and despite his defiance, he was nailed by the Church and the tabloid press.

The story is riddled with metaphor and enigma. When Davidson tried to raise funds to fight his case, he resumed his life as an actor, performing at various entertainments. He was exhibited next to a dead whale on one occasion, and met his death at a fete at Skegness when he was mauled in a lions’ cage.

The facts are grotesque and absurd, and it is easy to see how the gaudy details would appeal to Patrick White’s vinegary sense of satire. But finally the events make no sense. The Rev. Harold Davidson’s behaviour verged on the unhinged and suggested a fractured personality rather than an eccentric one. Director Neil Armfield has described Shepherd on the Rocks as a ‘fundamentally Australian play, about courage and honesty, and, in Patrick’s words, “the varieties of faith.” ‘It is difficult to see, apart from the shift of setting to New South Wales, what is Australian about the play. The satiric broadsides at the town of Budgiwank (sic), are vaguely anti-Rotarian, but they don’t have any focus to them. Similarly, any sense we get of King’s Cross, where White’s Reverend Danny Shepherd sheepishly wanders, is entirely accidental.

The fact is that the extraordinary events on which White based his play don’t travel well at all. That is not to say that hypocrisy and police corruption and all the other sins, venial and worse, don’t exist, but the play never gets beyond an odd kind of very English, Anglican whimsy, and for that reason we start to wonder whether Michael Palin’s film The Missionary and Peter Sellers in the Boulting Brothers’ sixties satire, Heavens Above, haven’t covered this part of the parish already.

In showing Danny Shepherd at home in Budgiwank, with his faithful wife Tib we get only a sense of their ineffectual gentility, and so, when our hero jumps on the train for a station in the Cross, and puts on his ‘I Love Everybody’ T-shirt with duplicitous glee, we wonder what the hell we’ve struck. Because the central character has no coherent identity, it is not possible to get very bothered about what happens to him, and just about everything does. Having taken his acolytes from the Cross back to Budgiwank, all hell breaks loose, and after interrogation by Church and State, Shepherd takes to wandering the New South Wales coast having dark nights of the soul amongst beached whales and on country fairgrounds.

Armfield has chosen a heightened anti-naturalistic style for his production, using the fullest expanse of the Playhouse stage, ponderously decked with neon and billowing backdrops by Brian Thomson. The sheer scale of the set with its meretricious neon circle and looming crucifix serves only to magnify the lack of substance in the play itself. The characters are neither satisfactory satiric creations nor strong symbolic forces, because the writer and director, in seeking stray comic and sentimental effects, refuse to push the material to the fierce expressionistic end-point that the misanthropic undertows in the play suggest.

For that reason, it is a curious work. Patrick White has indicated that Shepherd on the Rocks is a mouthpiece for his views, but his central character makes a poor fist of both loving and hating the world. In the lead, John Gaden is buffeted by the play’s unresolved shifts in style such that his Shepherd becomes an increasingly desperate set of gestures from over- heartiness to grand guignol to wobbly vaudeville. When he finally goes to the lions, it’s hard to be sorry.

In other roles, Wendy Harmer as Tib brings freshness to her long suffering lines and manages some dignity even while Danny, in cassock and shades, writhes around among the whalemeat. On the other hand, Kerry Walker is sunk before she starts as Queenie, the hooker from the Cross. Treating Queenie neither as type, parody or character, White hovers between Victorian pathos and nihilistic derision and Julie Lynch’s cruelly fetishistic costumes for both Queenie and Bee (Valentina Levkowicz) kill all credibility stone dead. Carole Skinner as Tilda Strutt of Tiddlers Bay serves up soup and platitudes with warmth but you can’t help feeling she’s been recycled from White’s earlier work.

Geoffrey Rush as Archbishop Bigge and Henri Szeps as Dean Shute, offer some distracting turns as the two lowdown Churchmen – Rush, complete with miracles of decrepit make-up and Szeps timing what material he has to comic perfection. Don Barker registers unease as Tom Teasdale and as Puss, the lion tamer, but who can blame him? Peter Crossley as Erroll Dick the private eye, gives a concise portrait of an ordinary Complete Bastard – yet another indication that he is a careful and thorough actor.

Shepherd on the Rocks is neither thematically nor theatrically persuasive. Instead of deciding who or what he is, Patrick White uses Danny Shepherd as an all-purpose picaresque moving target for things and people he doesn’t like while Neil Armfield, incontestably one of the best directors working in Australia, baulks for some reason at taking full control of the enterprise. Instead he fills the stage with theatrical busyness hoping no-one will notice.

John Gaden does his level best to keep all the skittles in the air but he can’t manage. Danny Shepherd is not the only one who could use a bit of divine intervention.

“Ham Funeral” The Adelaide Review No.39, June, 1987, p12.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment