The Ham Funeral by Patrick White

First published: 1965, in Four Plays

First produced: 1961, at the Adelaide University Theatre Guild, Adelaide, Australia

Type of plot: Expressionist

Time of work: 1919

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• The Young Man, a would-be poet
• Alma Lusty, a landlady
• Will Lusty, a landlord
• Phyllis Pither (The Girl), the Young Man’s anima

The Play

Before the curtain rises on the stage, the Young Man delivers a prologue to the audience. Although the program notes specify London, 1919, as the setting of the play, the Young Man declares that time and place do not matter, that he could have been “born in Birmingham . . . or Brooklyn . . . or Murwillumbah.” He explains that he is “alive” and therefore must “take part in the play, which . . . is a piece about eels.” This produces his dilemma as a poet: He “must take part in the conflict of eels, and survive at the same time.” In effect, he believes that he must live and yet maintain his artistic distance from life. The Young Man also warns the audience that “a number of you are wondering by now whether this is your kind of play”; he states that he cannot give them a “message.”

When the curtain rises, the interior of a lodging house is disclosed, but only the basement is lighted. Will Lusty, the landlord, a “vast . . . swollen” man, sits immobile and silent, for the most part, listening to his wife, Alma, who is “in the dangerous forties, ripe and bursting.” Before she asks the Young Man down for tea, she voices her discontent, her hunger for life, and her vanity (she repeatedly looks at herself in the imaginary mirror). Unconsciously, she reveals a tie between her dead son, Jack, and the Young Man, for she calls the latter Jack.

During the conversation in the Young Man’s bedroom, which is connected with the basement by stairs, Alma and the Young Man reveal their antithetical values. While Alma “would like to devour the world, and keep it warm inside,” the Young Man is withdrawn, lying down with his “cold,” “dead” hands behind his head. Before they go down to tea, the Young Man asks about the tenant in the other front room, which mirrors his room, and Alma identifies her as Phyllis Pither, a “steady girl” who “most nights goes to bed with an aspirin and a cold.” The Young Man, however, senses a presence, the touch of fingers on the other side of the wall where he rests his head.

Scene 4, in the basement, foreshadows Will’s death (the Young Man describes the somber setting as a funeral). Alma is after “life,” which is, according to Will, “wherever a man’appens to be.” The Young Man, suddenly aware that there is more to Will than he thought, wonders whether he is watching a tragedy or “two fat people in a basement, turning on each other.” Jack, the dead son, is the focus of the conflict: Will was not his father. The Young Man, who speaks of himself as the chorus, not as an actor in the tragedy, leaves the darkened basement weary and disillusioned.

As he mounts the stairs, the Young Man speaks of his desire to be recognized for his brilliance, nobility, and generosity. His ensuing conversation with the Girl in the other front room, certainly not Phyllis Pither, shows him the futility of escape from what the basement represents. As the two, who are separated by a wall, speak to each other, they mirror each other’s movements. The Young Man declares that if she remains on the other side of the wall, they can never “complete each other.” However, if completion is not possible in life, as she points out, then discovery is. If the Young Man is to discover himself, he must not “overlook the landlord” in the basement; when he reaches the basement, however, he finds Will dead.

Alma and the Young Man do not handle Will’s death well, either literally (they labor to deposit the heavy corpse on the bed but then discover that the feet have been placed on the pillow) or figuratively (the Young Man inadvertently refers to Will’s “dead weight” and begins to hiccup). Their conversation consists of two monologues, Alma expressing determination to serve ham at the wake and the Young Man discovering that he must act to assemble Will’s relatives.

In the street, the Young Man encounters two “ladies” who are rummaging through garbage cans. After he discovers a fetus in the trash, he concludes, “The landlord and the dead child are one,” but he is less certain of his identity. He hopes to “retire again, into a corner, and dream,” but he finally finds the relatives in a house that speaks, echoing his words. Although he invites four identical relatives to the ham funeral, only one accompanies him to the funeral; inexplicably all four attend the wake.

While the Young Man is in his room, the four relatives torment Alma, suggesting that she killed Will. Meanwhile, the Young Man and the Girl continue their conversation about a world that has “turned into a ball of mud,” a world he cannot ignore. He returns, at the Girl’s urging, to the basement wake.

After the Young Man dismisses the raucous, insulting relatives, he is left with Alma. Following is Alma’s choreographed pursuit of the Young Man, whom she variously treats as Will, her husband; Fred, her lover; and Jack, her son. They fall on the bed, but the Young Man resists her, almost strangles her, and declares that “flesh . . . isn’t the final answer.” When he climbs the stairs again, he believes he is free, but the Girl informs him that he will again “wrestle with the figures in the basement . . . passion and compassion.” The Young Man bursts through the door, but he does not find the Girl, who subsequently enters the house in the clothes of Phyllis Pither. He goes down to the basement, bids Alma good-bye, and walks “into the distance through a luminous night.”

Dramatic Devices

The house in which The Ham Funeral is set is a symbol of the Young Man’s exposed soul or psyche. While the audience can see the conventional three walls, there is an invisible fourth wall against which there are dressing tables with mirrors: “Anybody making use of the mirror must expose themselves fully to the audience.” Such exposure is essential to a play about self-discovery and about identity. Through lighting, the action alternates between foreground—the Lustys’ basement room—and background—the two identical upstairs bedrooms, which the Young Man and Phyllis Pither occupy. The symbolic occupants, however, are the animus and the anima, the two separate parts of the Young Man’s fragmented personality. The Girl asks rhetorically, “Am I your other self?” and adds that she will be with him in the basement “sitting on your right hand.” Her choreographed movements mirror the Young Man’s.

Urged by the Girl to descend to the basement, the Young Man must confront not only Alma’s appeal to the senses but also Will’s acceptance of life, his disbelief in the senses (“Bloody deluded!”), and his spiritual belief in inanimate objects (“This table is love . . . if you can get to know it”). Though they hold contrasting views of reality, Will and Alma embrace it, unlike the Young Man. In effect, before he can become an integrated (not “completed”) personality, the Young Man must invade the other space in the set (the other bedroom and the basement) and identify with its inhabitants, other fragments of his psyche.

Critical Context

Although Patrick White was considered Australia’s foremost novelist—he won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature—he was also an accomplished playwright who began writing plays in the early 1930’s. Although none of his early dramatic works (drawing-room comedy, sketches, naturalistic plays) has survived, they do attest White’s early interest in the theater. His novels reveal his gift for poetic dramatic dialogue. Written in 1946-1947, though not produced until 1961, The Ham Funeral marked a new direction for Australian drama when it was first produced (after having been rejected by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the Board of Governors of the Adelaide Festival) by the Adelaide University Theatre Guild.

White had new things to say in Australian drama, and naturalistic theater, then in vogue, was not an appropriate medium for him. Instead, he turned to expressionism and symbolism, which he also used in the three plays that he wrote and produced after The Ham Funeral: The Season at Sarsaparilla (pr. 1962), A Cheery Soul (pr. 1963), and Night on Bald Mountain (pr. 1963). In fact, the four plays, which were collectively published as Four Plays in 1965, are very much of a piece in technique and content. Their themes are consonant with the themes of his novels.

Though expressionism and symbolic sets were new to Australian theater, White’s work does derive from an established tradition in Western drama. Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg have been identified as influential, though White would also have been knowledgeable about the experimental efforts of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, which derive from the work of Bertolt Brecht. (The direct address to the audience in the prologue is blatantly Brechtian.) It is also possible that Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944, pb. 1945) was also a source; in that play Tom, also an autobiographical poet/narrator, addresses the audience, which watches a “memory play” enacted on a set similar to the one used in The Ham Funeral.

Regardless of its sources, The Ham Funeral did change the direction of Australian drama and established White’s distinctive fusion of content and form. Not only were the other three early plays written in the same vein, but White’s later play Signal Driver (pr. 1982, pb. 1983) closely resembles his earlier work.

Sources for Further Study

Argyle, Barry. Patrick White. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967.

Beatson, Peter. The Eye in the Mandala: Patrick White, a Vision of Man and God. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976.

Brissenden, R. F. “The Plays of Patrick White.” Meanjin Quarterly 22 (September, 1964): 243-256.

Covell, Roger. “Patrick White’s Plays.” Quadrant 8 (April/May, 1964): 7-12.

Douglas, Dennis. “Influence and Individuality: The Indebtedness of Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral and The Season at Sarsaparilla to Strindberg and the German Expressionist Movement.” In Bards, Bohemians, and Book Men: Essays in Australian Literature, edited by Leon Cantrell. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1976.

During, Simon. Patrick White. Hyattsville, Md.: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Herring, Thelma. “Maenads and Goat Song: The Plays of Patrick White.” Southerly 25 (1965): 219-233.

Loder, Elizabeth. “The Ham Funeral: Its Place in the Development of Patrick White.” Southerly 23 (1963): 78-91.

Tacey, David J. Patrick White: Fiction and the Unconscious. Hyattsville, Md.: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Weigel, John A. Patrick White. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

White, Patrick. Letters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.