Wakefield Press is looking forward to heading to Holden Street Theatres this week to watch ‘surreal satirical masterpiece’ A Cheery Soul by Patrick White, directed by Peter Goers. We’re pleased now to be sharing Stephen Orr‘s programme notes, shared with permission from Holden Street Theatre and Peter Goers.
Read Stephen’s lively notes below.
Banner image sourced from Wiki Commons.
Programme Notes: A Cheery Soul
In a Canberra Times review of Jim Sharman’s 1979 revival of Patrick White’s A Cheery Soul, critic Ken Healey wrote: ‘A Cheery Soul is one of the most profoundly satisfying experiences I have had of Australian theatre. It compares with seeing the whole of Lawler’s ‘Doll’ trilogy in a single day, and exceeds the delight of attending Williamson’s greatest successes.’ The production, a career-defining tour-de-force for Robyn Nevin as the titular Miss Docker, came as more Australians were becoming aware of the 1973 Nobel laureate’s body of work (what Barbara Blackman called the ‘Patrick White Australia policy’). From White’s earlier ‘European’ novels (The Living and the Dead, The Aunt’s Story), through to his fifties masterpieces (The Tree of Man, Voss, Riders in the Chariot), to his ‘meaty’ novels of the sixties and early seventies (The Vivisector, Eye of the Storm).
But there was more to White than novels. Born in England in 1912, he returned to Australia six months later, but was back in England at thirteen to attend boarding school in Cheltenham. From there to Cambridge, then London, where he (unsuccessfully) started writing plays (including The Ham Funeral, which was eventually produced by the University of Adelaide Theatre Guild in 1961). Travels, love affairs, a period in World War II as an RAF intelligence officer in the North African Desert. And through all of this, a love of art, music and theatre that accompanied his early struggles as a writer.
A Cheery Soul started as a short story, a part-portrait of Alex Scott, a gardener who worked one day a week at Dogwoods, White’s and his partner Manoly Lascaris’ Castle Hill property. According to David Marr: ‘She was fifteen stone of tough old lady with a crew cut, an army hat and a pair of flapping shorts worn in all weathers.’ As with Miss Docker, she was a good talker; a good soul with a good heart, a no-nonsense woman from a now-lost Australia where everyone had a stray aunt or uncle living in their sleep-out. She loved a beer and, according to Marr: ‘Out of her mouth poured handy hints, maxims, stray facts, anecdotes, recipes, new theories and frank observations.’ In short, perfect Patrick White material. One day, when she was pulling weeds with White, she told him, ‘I am praying that someday you will write something good.’
‘Scottie’ had suffered a mental breakdown working at David Jones, and had become (ironically) an expert on mental illness (once she told White: ‘You’re borderline’). She was a Christian, loved reading the Bible, taught Sunday school, sang in the church choir. White called Miss Docker/Scottie ‘a wrecker, who first of all almost destroys two private lives, then a home for old people and finally the Church, by her obsession that what she is doing for other people is for their own good.’ White realised this limitless obsession dragged down (as much as raised) Miss Docker, and the tragedy was she couldn’t see this herself. That none of us, perhaps, can see our own reflected (as White called them) ‘flaws in the glass’. White saying of his own biography: ‘I think this book should be called the Monster of All Time. But I am a monster …’ This short story and play, then, are catalogues of Miss Docker’s good deeds. As White provides a chorus of opinions to frame the story.
MRS CUSTANCE: She [Miss Docker] would be free to come and go. And she’s in such demand – babysitting – mending – we’ll hardly notice she’s here. Poor soul! Nobody in Sarsaparilla ever did so much good … You’ve got to justify yourself in some way. You can’t just take, take, without you show a little gratitude.
With the short story lined up for the September 1962 edition of the London Magazine, White decided Miss Docker should have a new life on stage. From the beginning, according to Marr, ‘[White] began to hear Miss Docker speaking in the voice of Nita Pannell, a short, plump and dynamic actress who had made her name as the mother in The One Day of the Year.’ White wrote the script in winter 1962, showed it to Pannell and told her, ‘It will require a virtuoso performance, from comedy to tragedy.’ Pannell wasn’t so sure about Miss Docker, but ‘[I] finally accepted, knowing full well the enormity of the undertaking – a completely unloved woman.’ White showed the script to director John Tasker, then sent a copy to Harry Medlin at the University of Adelaide Theatre Guild (which had recently staged his first two plays). But this time they decided against its length, large cast and poetic language. White wrote to a friend: ‘The university scientists who usually take the first plunge with my plays seem to have been shocked by the fact that God plays a certain part in this one …’
A Cheery Soul eventually premiered with the Union Theatre Repertory Company at the Union Theatre Melbourne on 19 November 1963. Nita Pannell as Miss Docker, spending Act I with a couple called the Custances who have taken pity on her. Moving, in Act II, to the Sundown Home for Old People, as past and present, real and imagined, blur. Finally retreating into God, her last (and perhaps only) real friend, attempting to help Reverend Wakeman salvage his flock, and faith. According to Julian Meyrick: ‘What drives Miss Docker is a presumptive belief that she knows the will of God. A Cheery Soul becomes a slow disabuse of this notion, as people recoil from her with instinctive repugnance and she is increasingly isolated.’ Or, as White put it: ‘Human behaviour is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable.’ Especially for Miss Docker who, in the end, suffers the ultimate humiliation.
MISS DOCKER: See that dog? … He lifted his leg on me. He wet me … I could have loved that dog. And then … It was a judgement. Judged by a dog …
SWAGGIE: Why should Gawd judge yer?
MISS DOCKER: I said ‘dog’! Not ‘God!’ See? … I never knew before, but ‘dog’ is ‘God’ turned round …
The play’s setting, in the fictional suburb of Sarsaparilla, was in equal parts paean to and condemnation of post-war suburbs spreading beyond Australian cities. City versus country, culture versus vulgarity, realism versus satire, good versus bad (Miss Docker constantly morphing between comedy and tragedy). To watch the play in full, one can feel, in equal parts, White’s love and venom fighting each other (as with her and the heavily symbolic Reverend Wakeman) to the death. Maybe this is what had brought him home from his London life? An attempt to resolve, in his own mind and heart, the contradictions of a new Australia, bubbling away like suet pudding in the asbestos-boxes metastasising across former agricultural land. Like something was being lost as quickly as it was being gained. And maybe Australians themselves picked up on this in 1962: ‘Halfway through [opening night] I began to smell a greater hostility than I have ever encountered at any of my other plays … Almost all the Melbourne critics condemned it (one of them in one line) saying that I am without wit, humour, love or even liking for human beings …’
A Cheery Soul was filmed for the BBC in 1966 (one review calling it ‘tedious’), went on to revivals in 1979, 1992, 2000 and 2018. It’s perhaps the most popular of White’s plays, Miss Docker (after Voss, perhaps) the most powerful of his creations. Because there’s something about a good beginning and a bad ending; about the constant struggle between what’s meant, and how it’s taken; between light and dark, good and evil, body and spirit. Jim Sharman, speaking about White’s plays in 1979, explained: ‘No one pretends they are easy. They make demands on actors and audiences but the rewards are considerable, like cracking a code.’ The fragmented lines, Greek choruses, hints of modernism and surrealism, and all Australian audiences wanted in 1963 was a good yarn. A few months after the premiere, White wrote to the director that his royalties were ‘a sad little sum’, but ‘money or no money, it will remain the best of my four plays to date.’ According to Julian Meyrick, Miss Docker has taken her place beside other ‘memorable monsters’ in Australian drama such as Monk O’Neil, (Stretch of the Imagination) and Jock (The Club) but, as Ken Healey’s 1979 review reminded us, ‘As I have already said, Miss Nevin did not become Miss Docker, but merely impersonated her, leaving the real Miss Docker as an all-too-lively wraith in the imagination of us all.’ Perhaps, in attempting to understand Miss Docker, we’re attempting to understand ourselves. And in the end, this is what makes great theatre.