The power of Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut is gorgeously evoked in a new stage adaptation

The Shepherd’s Hut arrives on stage fully formed: a relentless, bristling realisation of Tim Winton’s 2018 novel of the same name, in an adroit adaptation by Tim McGarry.

Director Matt Edgerton’s self-contained, clear-eyed accomplishment makes the most of its literary roots while also piecing together a unique theatrical language, to underpin the work’s visual and emotional bona fides.

The Shepherd’s Hut focuses on the story of Jaxie Clackton (Ryan Hodson), a teenage boy on the run, facing the extreme heat, hunger, dehydration and isolation of the outback. Elevated by Hodson’s full-throttled, emotionally-charged performance, Jaxie is searching for peace – not just quiet, but actual peace.

This makes sense against what we learn about the world he’s escaping: a violent father; his violent end; and the violence of a society in which he cannot get a foothold. Jaxie’s story emerges through flashbacks and memories. It is full of secrets and fears.

He is running not just from his past, but also from a fear of becoming just like his father.

Entering Jaxie’s world

With his pared-back set, designer Bruce McKinven opts for an evocation rather than a literal rendering of the Western Australian salt lands. The stage is striking: a huge sandy expanse backed by a fringed curtain that conjures both Winton’s vast “penitential landscape” and, with the help of Lucy Birkinshaw’s lighting design, multiple smaller, more intimate locations.

With the fringed curtain doubling as a projection screen, Roly Skender’s video design provides key images of faces and objects, still and moving. Working in tandem with Rachael Dease’s sparse score and Tim Collins’ all-encompassing sound design, the visual design becomes part of the language of the piece, supplementing the text and the audience’s imagination.

The chorus (Ben Mortley and Ella Prince, who also double as other supporting characters) embody Jaxie’s experiences, helping to bring what he sees and feels to life. Sometimes they are what is done to him; at other times they are the doing.

Like the projected images, the chorus works to provide additional descriptive and emotional information that expands the audience’s access to Jaxie’s world.

Jaxie’s meeting with Fintan MacGillis (George Shevtsov), living in exile in a dilapidated, deserted shepherd’s hut, becomes the story’s fulcrum. As MacGillis tells Jaxie, “a fella needs a story to make sense of the world”.

MacGillis is revealed to be a disgraced Irish priest, and some – but not all – of his secrets gradually emerge. Like Jaxie, MacGillis is shaped by his past. Unlike Jaxie, MacGillis is no longer completely defined by it.

In a story that deals with secrets and shame, the truth of the priest’s backstory remains unresolved. The focus becomes what he can provide the boy in the here and now.

The power of being seen

For all its epic qualities, The Shepherd’s Hut is satisfyingly compact. Stripped of props and set pieces, The Shepherd’s Hut is intrinsically theatrical in its reliance on bodies in space and the imagery provided by Winton’s language to tell the story of a boy leaving his past behind.

The possibility of adolescence as a site ripe for transformation, is gorgeously evoked in one of the play’s penultimate images: a projected close up of Jaxie’s face, seemingly motionless but for the movement of the curtain that generates multiple expressions, like a giant flipbook.

With this trick of the eye, the audience can glimpse the past, the present and the possibility of a different future for the boy.

What remains is the lasting impression of the power of being seen by another person and of how the world (and, in this case, the stage) has the potential to open up to peace.

The Shepherd’s Hut, from Black Swan State Theatre Company, is at the State Theatre Centre of WA until May 31.