Adelaide Festival board rejects Patrick White's 'The Ham Funeral' in 1962; university guild grabs world premiere
The set by Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski for University of Adelaide Theatre Guild's world premiere of Patrick White's The Ham Funeral at the Union Theatre in 1961, directed by John Tasker, Inset: Guild chairman Dr Harry Medlin was the diving force in securing the world premiere.
Australian master author Patrick White’s play The Ham Funeral was controversially rejected for the1962 Adelaide Festival by a conservative board of governors who'd previously banned Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year from the 1960 festival. The Ham Funeral was instead presented in 1963 by the University of Adelaide Theatre Guild at the university’s Union Hall, in association with the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust.
According the Patrick White’s biographer David Marr, the Adelaide festival board of governors at first deferred its decision about accepting The Ham Funeral: “The few who had read White’s play were nervous; the brewer Rolly (Ronald) Jacobs objected vehemently to its filth (because) the young man in the play finds an abortion in the garbage can”.
The governors and festival chief executive major general Ronald Hopkins deferred to Glen McBride, a former Tivoli variety circuit manager who was working for the Waterman brothers’ South Australian film theatres chain. McBride, who only claimed commercial expertise (“I’m not artistic”), told the festival governors that The Ham Funeral was filthy and “not up to much”. McBride was recruited as the only dissenter of the festival’s literary committee headed by Geoffrey Dutton, who’d convinced White to put The Ham Funeral on at the festival.
The festival board of governors kept stacking Dutton’s committee with men they judged would be hostile to White’s play. The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) head of drama Stafford Dyson warned the governors to “think very seriously before turning down the opportunity of a work of this class”. The governors ignored that advice. They declared Dutton’s committee irrevocably split and intervened to reject The Ham Funeral.
Dr. Harry Medlin, a long-time University of Adelaide lecturer, administrator and its theatre guild chairman was a key figure in securing Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral and other plays for the guild in the early 1960s. Medlin saw the significance of The Ham Funeral (“it revolutionized Australian theatre”) from the immediate impact of the script on himself and his wife Didi: “You know you’re dealing with deep sentiments, you know you’re dealing with tragedy and tragic farce….It’s soul stirring and for a physicist and a chemist (she was a mathematical chemist, I was a mathematical physicist), for two scientists to read this stuff, the language was magic’.
After his first reading, Medlin was determined for the university theatre guild to produce The Ham Funeral. The result was a triumph. Australia’s New Theatre company described it as “one of the most intriguingly original plays in Australian theatre history”. Geoffrey Dutton summed up the immediate impact of the play: "Perhaps there was among the audience the thought that a reactionary establishment was being beaten on its own ground, that the evening was going to be a triumph of the imagination over mediocrity. So it was."
White was fired up by The Ham Funeral knockback: “One is inclined to think of Adelaideans as being advanced because of a handful of progressives one knows. But the majority are terribly starchy and reactionary.” It motivated him to write another play, The Season at Sarsaparilla (1962), that he entrusted, along with his Night on the Bald Mountain (1964), for world premieres to the University of Adelaide Theatre Guild, directed by his favoured John tTasker.
The Ham Funeral was included in the Adelaide Festival programme in 2012.