March 1 , 2012
\nAdelaide Festival
\nTheatre<\/p>\n
The Ham Funeral
\nby Patrick White
\nState Theatre Company
\nOdeon Theatre, Queen Street
\nFebruary 27. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59
\nBookings : BASS 131 246 or Adelaidefestival.com.au
\nUntil March 18<\/p>\n
For his 2012 Festival production, State Theatre\u2019s departing artistic director, Adam Cook has shown an astute sense of occasion. Not only is this year the centenary of Patrick White\u2019s birth but it is just over fifty years since the programming of The Ham Funeral was infamously rejected by the board of the 1962 Adelaide Festival. It was quickly taken up by the Adelaide Theatre Guild for a season in November 1961 but, for the infuriated playwright and the tattered reputation of the city, the damage was done. <\/p>\n
Written in 1947 and inspired in part by the William Dobell painting The Dead Landlord, the play draws on White\u2019s own experiences in digs in London during the grim austerity of the post-war period. His play is set in a \u201cgreat, damp, crumbling house\u201d and features the progress of a Young Man, a poet, (Luke Clayson) moving from innocence to experience as he descends the stage from the mezzanine of romantic idealism to the basement world of appetite and the id. There the soon-to-expire Will Lusty and his exuberantly libidinous wife can be found. There is a boisterous vulgarity in their interaction which accelerates in Act Two as the mourners arrive to eat ham and drink beer in the parlour. <\/p>\n
In this production Cook and designer Ailsa Paterson have created a strong visual impact with the seedy two storey tenement daubed in blobs and huge stripes of black and shades of grey. The opening scene with Jonathan Mill as Will and Amanda Muggleton, excellent as the well-named Mrs Lusty, reinforces the drabness of life where every part of the d\u00e9cor, including the food, is ashen grey. <\/p>\n
But these strengths are undermined – by the use of London accents, when sounding like a \u201cwedge of black (Australian) cockatoos\u201d would have worked better – and, much more significantly, by the extravagance of the costuming. First, there are the Knockabout Ladies (played with vaudeville gusto by Jacqy Phillips and Geoff Revell) and then the outlandish black and spangled clown outfits of the Relatives revealed at the beginning of Act Two. <\/p>\n
Dressing these screeching visitors like escapees from The Dark Crystal or Tim Burton\u2019s Alice simply does not serve the puritanical, Dickensian parsimony of the scene. The costumes are brilliantly imagined and constructed but they belong in another play. They come close to toppling White\u2019s already over-contrived symbolic structure and make the earthy poignancy of Muggleton\u2019s Mrs Lusty harder to register. This Ham Funeral, in many ways more lucid and accessible than previous productions is, unfortunately, over-dressed for the occasion. <\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
\u201cJust too dressed up for austerity Britain\u201d The Australian, March2, 2012, p.17. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
March 1 , 2012 Adelaide Festival Theatre The Ham Funeral by Patrick White State Theatre Company Odeon Theatre, Queen Street February 27. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59 Bookings : BASS 131 246 or Adelaidefestival.com.au Until March 18 For his 2012 Festival production, State Theatre\u2019s departing artistic director, Adam Cook has shown an astute sense of occasion. Not only is this year the centenary of Patrick White\u2019s birth but it is just over fifty years since the programming of The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,5,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-23","category-archive","category-state-theatre-company","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1779,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions\/1779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}