An opera looking for its music

A review of the Malthouse Theatre production of Patrick White’s ‘The Ham Funeral’, playing in repertory with Tom Wright’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’, April 11 to May 9.

Patrick White had rather more success than Henry James with his plays – though that is not saying much. James’s attempt in the 1890s to conquer the London stage was a theatrical and personal disaster, but has, remarkably, provoked two recent novels, Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author. The plays were no great loss, and it was to our ultimate benefit that James returned his creative energy to the novel.