‘The Ham Funeral’, is one of the most intriguingly original plays in the Australian theatre history, written in 1948 by Australia’s only Nobel Laureate for Literature, Patrick White. The story dealing with frivolity, excess and desire, centres around an impressionable young poet and his existential search for the meaning of life.
The Ham Funeral
In a gothic inner-city boarding house, a naïve young poet is drawn into the fetid world of the basement-dwelling landlord and his wife, the hauntingly grotesque Mr and Mrs Lusty.
When her husband drops dead suddenly, Mrs Lusty announces a lavish funeral feast in his honour. Driven by her relentless appetite, she attempts to seduce the poet, drawing him into a dangerous sexual game with comically tragic consequences.
Part vaudeville, part lyric poem, and part gothic drama, it is an unnervingly dark and vulgar investigation of the human condition.
Director: Kate Gaul
A Siren Theatre Co & Griffin Independent Production.
-
Jenny Wu is the floating, exquisite animus.
Lisa Thatcher
-
Jenny Wu is radiant as The Girl.
-
This is a glorious production.
-
Guided by his beautiful ghostly alter ego (Jenny Wu, in a luminous performance) the Young Man becomes caught up in Mrs Lusty’s attempts to seduce him.
-
…while Jenny Wu is a perfectly ethereal presence as the girl who lives across the corridor from the young man.
-
Jenny Wu is gracious and almost ghost like as the young female lodger.
-
Trailing the young man onstage is a figure who lives in his mind. She is called only The Girl (Jenny Wu), an apparition of a woman who is supposed, it seems, to guide the young man into his life’s true purpose. Wu is captivating…
-
Celebrated director, Kate Gaul (The Trouble with Harry, Good With Maps, Misterman) and a stellar cast of some of Australia’s boldest, bravest performers bring this eerie, black comedy to life for Griffin Independent at the SBW Stables Theatre.
-
Gleefully infectious, the wonderful cast looks and feels to be made up of all those voted most likely to run off and join the circus. Idiosyncratic and profoundly eccentric, we are persuaded to relate to the show in a manner that is perhaps unusual for many.
-
The characters are engaging in their oddness, making this production a distinct one.
Heather McNab from Fairfax’s Central Sydney magazine writes about Jenny Wu’s involvement in Patrick White's The Ham Funeral, directed by Kate Gaul, playing at Griffin Theatre.
Dealing with love, life and death, the play looks at the young man's attempts to 'combine the body and the mind, the intellect and flesh, thinking and feeling into one', Wu said.
