With Patrick White, it is a rather different story. Like James, he had always been attracted to theatre. In the 1930s he had written revue sketches, and a play, Return to Abyssinia, written before World War II, finally made it to the London stage in 1947. White was at this time on a visit to Australia and never saw the production that David Marr describes as ‘a respectable failure’. (Apparently, only a synopsis of the play survives.) Later in the same year, having made the decision to live in Australia, White returned to London to pack up his belongings before making the journey back to Sydney with his lover, Manoly Lascaris.

In Sydney, the painter William Dobell had told him the story behind his painting, The dead landlord, painted in Pimlico before the war: how the landlord of the digs where Dobell was living had died, and the landlady, taking down her hair, had declared there would be a ham funeral, and despatched Dobell to invite the relatives. This image was the starting point for The Ham Funeral. White once said that it was through a painter that he had learned to write – he was referring to Roy de Maistre – and painters and paintings were always important influences.

Initially, there seemed a possibility of The Ham Funeral being produced in either London or New York, but these hopes soon evaporated. Back in Sydney, he submitted the script to Doris Fitton who presided over the Independent Theatre, an outpost of ‘serious’ drama, but there it languished in a bottom drawer. It was Geoffrey Dutton who, years later, fascinated by what White had told him of the play, winkled the script out of him and submitted it to the drama committee of the Adelaide Festival. They took it up with enthusiasm, only to have their recommendation rejected by the governors of the festival, who had already shown their mettle as moral guardians by rejecting Alan Seymour’s One Day of the Year (1960) for the previous festival. With The Ham Funeral, disgust was expressed at a scene in which two scavenging women find an aborted foetus in a dustbin. All this confirmed White’s contempt for the prudish morality of Australian suburbia, but the Adelaide University Theatre Guild seized the opportunity to stage a successful production in 1961, which was followed by a triumphant professional production in Sydney. The controversy surrounding The Ham Funeral stimulated White into a frenzy of play-writing, and The Season at Sarsaparilla (1962), A Cheery Soul (1963) and Night on Bald Mountain (1964) soon followed (these four works comprise Volume 1 of White’s Collected Plays, Currency Press, 1985).

White’s plays have never had the kind of popularity enjoyed by Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) or Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, but they made a significant impact on a younger theatre generation, particularly directors such as Jim Sharman and Rex Cramphorn, who were eager to break out of the constraints of naturalistic drama. It is surprising, therefore, that The Ham Funeral, which is where it all began, has never been staged before in Melbourne. Michael Kantor directs this Malthouse production in tandem with Tom Wright’s new play, Journal of the Plague Year.

Kantor gives us a postmodern take on The Ham Funeral. The layered set envisaged by White – with the landlord and landlady inhabiting the murky, id-like basement, and the poet and his anima, the Girl, upstairs – has been forsaken for a wide, brilliantly lit space in front of a wall of glass behind which the Girl is seen and (with the aid of a microphone) heard. The staircase, when required, is marked out by panels of white light on the stage floor. The performances, too, take White’s caricatures right to the edge and, in some cases, beyond. Ross Williams’s Landlord, Will Lusty, is massively solid and taciturn, and he dies with superb casualness, while Julie Forsyth as the Landlady, Alma, undulates loosely around the stage in an over-the-top but commandingly watchable performance. On the other hand, the shrillness of the scavenging women drowns out the black comedy of their street scene. Robert Menzies leads an impressively bizarre quartet of relatives.

The play opens with White’s Young Man, the poet in the making, taking the audience into his confidence: ‘Probably quite a few of you are wondering by now whether this is your kind of play … You must simply sit it out, and see whether you can recognise some of the forms that will squirm before you.’ And squirm they do. Dan Spielman gives an engaging performance as White’s alter ego, but it is necessarily in a different key to the caricatures around him. White was very self-conscious about the Young Man – ‘an impossible, irritating, congealed part’, he once wrote. When he described it as ‘almost an act of indecent exposure’, he would have had in mind the final sexual confrontation between the poet and Alma Lusty. ‘No man ever leaves the breast,’ boasts Alma. ‘That’s our weapon. The softest weapon in the world.’ Spielman and Forsyth negotiate this difficult scene with assurance.

In her Age review (April 18), Helen Thomson sees the play as something of a relic, the 2005 audience having ‘long since moved on’. These days, it seems, we are always being encouraged to move on, having, of course, first sought closure. White’s Young Man has ‘not yet found out for sure’ whether he is a poet or not, and the dilemma of the artist-in-the-making is surely just as real today as it was in 1947. And is it quite true to describe White’s theatre as ‘the road not taken’ by Australian drama? His expressionistic theatricality might seem to have more resonance for a significant stream of contemporary theatre than the three-act naturalism of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, important as that play is in the Australian pantheon.

With a poet at its centre, The Ham Funeral is a celebration of language. According to Jim Sharman, ‘Australians have always been suspicious of words’. Patrick White insistently put words into our sometimes unwilling mouths. But White also saw the play as ‘an opera looking for its music’. Max Lyandvert’s piano accompaniment is important in this production, but will a composer eventually take up the larger challenge? In the meantime, for my money, The Ham Funeral deserves its place in the Australian theatrical canon.