A
review of the Malthouse Theatre production
of Patrick White's The Ham Funeral,
playing in repertory with Tom Wright's
Journal of the Plague Year, April 11
to May 8.
PATRICK
WHITE HAD rather more success than Henry
James with his plays - though that is
not saying much. James's attempt in
the 1890s to conquer the London stage
was a theatrical and personal disaster,
but has, remarkably, provoked two recent
novels, Colm Tóibín's
The Master and David Lodge's
Author, Author. The plays were
no great loss, and it was to our ultimate
benefit that James returned his creative
energy to the novel.
With Patrick White, it is a rather different
story. Like James, he had always been
attracted to theatre. In the 1930s he
had written revue sketches, and a play,
Return to Abyssinia, written
before World War II, finally made it
to the London stage in 1947. White was
at this time on a visit to Australia
and never saw the production that David
Marr describes as 'a respectable failure'.
(Apparently, only a synopsis of the
play survives.) Later in the same year,
having made the decision to live in
Australia, White returned to London
to pack up his belongings before making
the journey back to Sydney with his
lover, Manoly Lascaris.
In Sydney, the painter William Dobell
had told him the story behind his painting,
The dead landlord, painted in
Pimlico before the war: how the landlord
of the digs where Dobell was living
had died, and the landlady, taking down
her hair, had declared there would be
a ham funeral, and despatched Dobell
to invite the relatives. This image
was the starting point for The Ham
Funeral. White once said that it
was through a painter that he had learned
to write - he was referring to Roy de
Maistre - and painters and paintings
were always important influences.
Initially there seemed a possibility
of The Ham Funeral being produced
in either London or New York, but these
hopes soon evaporated. Back in Sydney,
he submitted the script to Doris Fitton
who presided over the Independent Theatre,
an outpost of 'serious' drama, but there
it languished in a bottom drawer. It
was Geoffrey Dutton who, years later,
fascinated by what White had told him
of the play, winkled the script out
of him and submitted it to the drama
committee of the Adelaide Festival.
They took it up with enthusiasm, only
to have their recommendation rejected
by the governors of the festival, who
had already shown their mettle as moral
guardians by rejecting Alan Seymour's
One Day of the Year (1960) for
the previous festival. With The Ham
Funeral, disgust was expressed at
a scene in which two scavenging women
find an aborted foetus in a dustbin.
All this confirmed White's contempt
for the prudish morality of Australian
suburbia, but the Adelaide University
Theatre Guild seized the opportunity
to stage a successful production in
1961, which was followed by a triumphant
professional production in Sydney. The
controversy surrounding The Ham Funeral
stimulated White into a sudden frenzy
of play-writing, and The Season at
Sarsaparilla (1962), A Cheery
Soul (1963) and Night on Bald
Mountain (1964) soon followed (these
four works comprise Volume 1 of White's
Collected Plays, Currency Press,
1985).
White's plays have never had the kind
of popularity enjoyed by Ray Lawler's
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
(1955) or Seymour's The One Day of
the Year, but they made a significant
impact on a younger theatre generation,
particularly directors such as Jim Sharman
and Rex Cramphorn who were eager to
break out of the constraints of naturalistic
drama. It is surprising, therefore,
that The Ham Funeral, which is
where it all began, has never been staged
before in Melbourne. Michael Kantor
directs this Malthouse production in
tandem with Tom Wright's new play, Journal
of the Plague Year.
Kantor
gives us a postmodern take on The
Ham Funeral. The layered set envisaged
by White - with the landlord and landlady
inhabiting the murky, id-like basement,
and the poet and his anima, the Girl,
upstairs - has been forsaken for a wide,
brilliantly lit space in front of a
wall of glass behind which the Girl
is seen and (with the aid of a microphone)
heard. The staircase, when required,
is marked out by panels of white light
on the stage floor. The performances,
too, take White's caricatures right
to the edge and, in some cases, beyond.
Ross Williams's Landlord, Will Lusty,
is massively solid and taciturn, and
he dies with superb casualness, while
Julie Forsyth as the Landlady, Alma,
undulates loosely around the stage in
an over-the-top but commandingly watchable
performance. On the other hand, the
shrillness of the scavenging women drowns
out the black comedy of their street
scene. Robert Menzies leads an impressively
bizarre quartet of relatives.
The
play opens with White's Young Man, the
poet in the making, taking the audience
into his confidence: 'Probably quite
a few of you are wondering by now whether
this is your kind of play … You
must simply sit it out, and see whether
you can recognize some of the forms
that will squirm before you.' And squirm
they do. Dan Spielman gives an engaging
performance as White's alter ego but
it is necessarily in a different key
to the caricatures around him. White
was very self-conscious about the Young
Man - 'an impossible, irritating, congealed
part' he once wrote. When he described
it as 'almost an act of indecent exposure'
he would have had in mind the final
sexual confrontation between the poet
and Alma Lusty. 'No man ever leaves
the breast,' boasts Alma. 'That's our
weapon. The softest weapon in the world.'
Spielman and Forsyth negotiate this
difficult scene with assurance.
In her Age review (April 18),
Helen Thomson sees the play as something
of a relic, the 2005 audience having
'long since moved on'. These days, it
seems, we are always being encouraged
to move on, having, of course, first
sought closure. White's Young Man has
'not yet found out for sure' whether
he is a poet or not, and the dilemma
of the artist-in-the-making is surely
just as real today as it was in 1947.
And is it quite true to describe White's
theatre as 'the road not taken' by Australian
drama? His expressionistic theatricality
might seem to have more resonance for
a significant stream of contemporary
theatre than the three-act naturalism
of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,
important as that play is in the Australian
pantheon.
With a poet at its centre, The Ham
Funeral is a celebration of language.
According to Jim Sharman, 'Australians
have always been suspicious of words'.
White insistently put words into our
sometimes unwilling mouths. But White
also saw the play as 'an opera looking
for its music'. Max Lyandvert's piano
accompaniment is important in this production,
but will a composer eventually take
up the larger challenge? In the meantime,
for my money, The Ham Funeral
deserves its place in the Australian
theatrical canon.
