Birthday gift

STATE Theatre Company of South Australia celebrates its 40th birthday with a season of plays that features eye-gouging and cannibalism.

Adam Cook

STATE Theatre Company of South Australia celebrates its 40th anniversary next year, and artistic director Adam Cook has curated a season of plays that features, among other things, eye-gouging, cannibalism and the world's first electric vibrator.

The STCSA boss is clearly confident Adelaide in 2012 is far more broad-minded than it was half a century ago, when Patrick White's early expressionist play The Ham Funeral was twice rejected by the Adelaide Festival's board of governors.

The rejection of White's drama, which Cook is reviving for his company's 40th birthday season, became a national cause célèbre: White was then Australia's most successful literary novelist, yet the board declared his play too "difficult" for the average punter to understand.

The dumping of The Ham Funeral became a galvanising moment for those who were fed up with the country's illiberal establishment, according to White's biographer, David Marr, who has written that the controversy spread beyond Adelaide and "dragged in many who were hardly interested in the theatre. The Ham Funeral had become a rallying point for those who were unhappy with the boring, official culture of Australia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and hated the philistine power of the Establishment."

In turning down this emphatically non-naturalistic drama, which explores a young poet's struggle to express his talent, the festival board had taken the extraordinary step of overruling its drama advisory committee. (The committee had unanimously agreed The Ham Funeral should be showcased at the 1962 festival.)

Fast-forward 50 years, and Cook is to direct a revival in a year that marks another culturally important anniversary: the centenary of White's birth. Says Cook: "I was looking for a way to celebrate this in our season. The Ham Funeral is the perfect birthday gift to pay homage to his genius, and to introduce a whole new audience [and] generation to his work. It's a good time for us to re-examine his literary and theatrical world."

As if to right a historical wrong, Cook's production will be co-presented by the Adelaide Festival. It will feature Amanda Muggleton as the libidinous landlady Mrs Lusty, who attempts to seduce the poet at her husband's wake. Cook believes his production will be the first, fully professional staging of the drama in the City of Churches.

"I've had a long, personal love for and professional association with Patrick White. I wrote my Master's thesis on him, and adapted his novel The Aunt's Story to the stage, a production ... starring Helen Morse. This is the first time I will have directed one of his own plays." This "audaciously anti-naturalistic'" work, with its poetic and vaudevillian flourishes, is "perfect festival fare".

But clearly, in the postwar era, the festival's governors were, if anything, behind the times: in 1960 they spurned Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year – which went on to become an Australian classic – because they thought it disrespectful towards the ANZAC tradition. In 1963, another White play, Night on Bald Mountain, was again rejected by the board, prompting the writer to lament: "To be kicked in the arse for the third time by the philistine Adelaide Establishment is really a bit much."

White also said he disliked "the idea of playing the part of the intellectual and social pariah of Adelaide".

At the time of The Ham Funeral furore there was no permanent, professional theatre company in Adelaide, so the play was staged by the University of Adelaide's Theatre Guild in 1961, just four months before the 1962 Adelaide Festival. In the wake of the controversy, this partly professional production drew national and international attention, and drama critics praised it to the hilt. The play was then given a commercial production in Sydney in 1962 – then a rare honour for a new Australian play – overseen by White's hand-picked director, John Tasker.

Under Tasker's direction, Adelaide's Theatre Guild produced two more White plays in the early 1960s. Tasker went on to establish the South Australian Theatre Company in 1965.

Seven years after that, then premier Don Dunstan moved to secure the company's future. In 1972, legislation was passed confirming its status as a state theatre company and statutory authority, meaning that it can be dissolved only by an act of parliament. "So we're definitely considered to be a necessary part of the South Australian cultural landscape," says Cook.

Next year Cook will dust off classics such as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and also present newer, edgier works. Blasted, the 1995 play by British playwright and "honorary lad" Sarah Kane, was one of the most contentious dramas of the late 20th century. It was denounced by UK critics because of its graphic depiction of rape, torture and cannibalism, one paper calling it a "disgusting feast of filth". (Some critics had a change of heart after Kane committed suicide in 1999.)

Another provocative work is American Sarah Ruhl's In The Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, about a 19th century doctor who uses a newly electrified vibrator to treat hysteria, mostly in women.

STCSA has suffered a 25 per cent drop in subscriber numbers since 2006, which one staff member recently described as "scary". Cook says overall ticket sales are stronger than subscription sales, but he acknowledges, "Adelaide is a small market now flooded with many entertainment options" and that "in times of economic uncertainty, the entertainment dollar is the first thing to go".

As its subscribers age, the company is assiduously cultivating the youth market. Its Red Carpet program is aimed at the under 30s and offers discounted tickets and a chance to meet a show's actors and other creatives. The program is extremely successful, says Cook. "Most of the Red Carpet events over the last two years have sold out."