Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral caused quite a stir when it was rejected from the Adelaide Festival in 1962. Under the directorial hand of Kate Gaul, Siren Theatre Co. has taken White’s script back out of the vault.
Soaked with post-war gloom, this tragicomedy is a “mad, muddy mess of eels”, in the words of the young man who takes up lodging in the play’s creaking, decrepit house. This young man (Sebastian Robinson), a poet with no past, delivers a prologue and declares the plight of the artist as one of “knowing too much and not enough”. Positioned as both a character and a commentator, he moves around the house of the bawdy Alma and jaded Will Lusty (Eliza Logan and Johnny Nasser).
When Will suddenly drops dead, Alma and the poet rally together the relatives in anticipation of a ‘ham funeral’. The motley suburban circus that crawls out of the undergrowth is probably the strongest part of the story: Nasser, Jane Phegan, Carmen Lysiak and Andy Dexterity are like a tribe of oddballs from the world of Roald Dahl – twitchy, creepy and perfectly costumed.
Unfortunately, Robinson’s performance as the aspiring poet feels stilted, as if he’s labouring through White’s verbosity while Jenny Wu appears as his ethereal muse echoing around the stage, dancing in and out of the spotlight. Logan, however, is a steady enough centrepiece as the brash and outlandish Alma, building toward an attempted seduction of the young man.
The Ham Funeral is a difficult play to lift from page to stage. The language is rich and metaphorical – for instance, the young man describes the relatives as having “thin shoulders green at the seams”. But White’s script still feels contrived and overdone, as if ultimately an exercise in intricate lyricism, symbols and metaphors.
As a consequence, the writing seems to weigh down the action of the play and whatever motivations are driving its characters.
The Ham Funeral is playing at SBW Stables Theatre until Saturday June 10.
