Shepherd on the Rocks

SHEPHERD ON THE ROCKS (1987)

Margaret Preston, The children’s circus, Taronga Zoo (1944)

“Are you for magic?”

Plot: Daniel Shepherd, rector of the small town of Budgiwank, is a former showman who now uses his position in the pulpit to preach goodness, while retaining his performing style. However when Shepherd becomes convinced that he can convert the sex workers and perverts of Kings Cross, he brings them to his seaside town and merges them with the rest of his parishioners, in the hopes of improving both the wayward and the overly conformist. When a glamorous actress joins the household, the media develops an interest in this unusual experiment. But Shepherd and his reluctant wife Elizabeth soon find themselves falling afoul of the church governors. They must return to the stage, with Shepherd tapping his way to Jerusalem, a nearby town with a much better shopping centre. The story ends in a circus, where Daniel ends up in the lion’s cage, seeking redemption of his own.

Editions: Shepherd on the Rocks is the only one of PW’s Australian plays to not receive a separate publication. It is collected in the now out-of-print Collected Plays, Volume 2 (Currency Press, 1994, with an introduction by Pamela Payne).

History: During 1985, while rehearsing the Sydney première of Signal Driver, actor Kerry Walker told PW about a story from Alan Jenkins’ The Thirties. The story was about Harold Davidson, the vicar of the English town of Stiffkey, who was thrown out of the church and ended his days in a sideshow, apparently eaten by one of the lions. PW had been at Cambridge with the vicar’s son, and was immediately excited by the idea. Once he had finished his final novel, Memoirs of Many in One, PW began researching for this play (including taking some lines straight from Jenkins), which he initially titled “The Budgiwank Experiment”. He wrote it in the early weeks of 1986.

The play brings together the vaudevillian aspects of Signal Driver with the more formally daring, often symbolist styles of PW’s first four plays. Daniel’s excess of goodness recalls Miss Docker in A Cheery Soul while the play’s return to the corrupt world of Sydney recalls Big Toys. As the play goes on, PW allows its seemingly normal world to fall apart in a farcical way (reminiscent of his previous play Netherwood). As his last full-length work, Shepherd on the Rocks has been seen as a kind of The Tempest for PW’s career, and an amalgam of many of his previous styles. May-Brit Akerholt says that it is “Australia’s rival to Hamlet when it comes to quotable phrases. Its language is complex and rich and contains a mixture of original and borrowed proverbs and sayings.”

As had been the case since the beginning of his theatre career, PW was most embraced in Adelaide. John Gaden – who had appeared in two previous PW productions – was now the Artistic Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, and accepted the play for the company’s 1987 season, in honour of the writer’s 75th birthday. PW spent much of April 1987 in attendance at rehearsals, prior to the show opening on the 9th of May. The original production used a minimalist set designed by Brian Tasker, with a red ring on a black floor imitating perhaps the spotlight of a circus, and a cyclorama of sky and clouds around the outside. The production reunited several people who had worked with PW before, including director Neil Armfield, designer Thompson, composer Carl Vine, and a cast that included Gaden, Carole Skinner, Geoffrey Rush, and Kerry Walker.

Reviewers, however, were largely mystified by a play which – PW acknowledged in his opening night speech to the audience – was a “vehicle for his own views”. After the three-week run, Shepherd was not picked up by any interstate theatre companies; the Sydney Theatre Company considered the play for its 1989 season, but chose not to go ahead (SMH 30/4/1989, p.74). Unusually, Currency Press – the premier theatre publisher in Australia – did not release it as a standalone script, despite most of White’s previous scripts being reliable sellers for that publishing house over the course of the 1980s and 1990s.

Aside from a one-night-only staged reading in Canberra in 1993, Shepherd on the Rocks has never been performed professionally since, and has rarely been written about. It remains perhaps PW’s least-known mature work.

Productions:

State Theatre Company of South Australia, Playhouse Theatre Adelaide, 9 – 30 May 1987

Director: Neil Armfield, costumes: Julie Lynch, design: Brian Thomson, composer: Carl Vine

With Don Barker (Tom Teasdale / Puss / Percy Grice), Terence Crawford (Krish Karma / News Team / Male Whale Saver), Peter Crossley (Erroll Dick / Len Stubbs), John Gaden (The Reverend Daniel Shepherd), Wendy Harmer (Elizabeth Shepherd), Valentina Levkowicz (Bee), Catherine McClements (Policewoman Rhonda Moffat / News Team / Female Whale Saver), Geoffrey Rush (Archbishop Wilfred Bigge / Lawyer / Police Sarge), Carole Skinner (Lily Thripp / Pink Lady / Sonia Slitzkin / Tilda Strutt) Scott Smith (Dill), Henri Szeps (Dean Bartholomew Shute / Ern / Nat Wormald), Kerry Walker (Queenie) and Doris Younane (Blue Lady / Feelia Rainbow / Organiste)

Reviews:

  • Helen Musa, Canberra Times 10/5/1987
  • Peter Ward, The Australian, 11/5/1987
  • Samela Harris, The Advertiser 11/5/1987
  • Diane Beer, The News 12/5/1987
  • Ken Healey, SMH 12/5/1987:
    • “This is anything but a well-made play… Yet the play is distinctively Patrick White’s and largely unclassifiable.”
  • Michael Morley, Financial Review, 15/5/1987
  • Barry Oakley, Sunday Times 17/5/1987
  • Brian Hoad, “White Puts on a Spiritual Vaudeville Show”, Bulletin 19/5/1987
  • Murray Bramwell, “Patrick White and the Whited Sepulchres”, Centrestage Australia and Adelaide Review, June 1987:
    • “The play lacks courage and honesty and, for the audience, engenders only a variety of disbelief… Shepherd on the Rocks is oddly dated when it tilts against windmills which have ceased to have general interest… What is perplexing is that Patrick White could have built his play around a totally unconvincing central character.”

Rawcus Productions – ANU Arts Centre, Canberra: 5 April 1993

This was the 4th production in a two-year project to stage readings of all of White’s plays. The project was conceived by Ralph Wilson, and this one-night only performance was directed by David Atfield. 

Previous play: Netherwood

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