Sex and Alma Lusty, the landlady of a dangerous age

AMANDA Muggleton is not afraid of 'delving into naughty places' in her role as a lusty widow.

Amanda Muggleton

AMANDA Muggleton is reflecting on the sex scenes she performed in soaps including Prisoner and Richmond Hill in the late 1970s and early 80s. Sounding more matter of fact than indignant, she recalls how her screen lovers were men "who were all twice my age. That's how people thought it should be back then."

In Prisoner, a racy drama about life inside a women's prison, she played Chrissie Latham, the Cockney "tart with a heart" who uttered memorable lines such as: "The only fing I'm good at is lyin' on me back."

Thirty years on, Muggleton is about to play a strikingly different character who, nonetheless, shares Chrissie's East End accent and carnal appetites. That character is Patrick White's Alma Lusty, a middle-aged landlady who attempts to seduce her young male lodger at her husband's wake. Mrs Lusty is one of the lead characters in White's early expressionist play, The Ham Funeral, and the novelist and dramatist described her as being in "the dangerous 40s; ripe and bursting".

With a big, barking laugh, Muggleton explains that White meant Mrs Lusty "has almost gone to seed. Let's call it her cougar age. Back then (1947) when White wrote the play, once a woman hit 40, it was all over and out. But nowadays, of course, in your late 40s and 50s you're still in with a chance."

The Ham Funeral is being revived by the State Theatre Company of South Australia for the Adelaide Festival, in this, the centenary of White's birth. This production is thought to be Adelaide's first professional staging of the play, which was infamously rejected by the Adelaide Festival's board of governors roughly 50 years ago. White was then our most accomplished literary novelist and went on to become the only Australian to win a Nobel prize for Literature, yet the festival's board of governors deemed The Ham Funeral too "difficult" and "confusing" for theatregoers.

The play was picked up and staged by the University of Adelaide's Theatre Guild in 1961, just four months before the 1962 Adelaide Festival. The festival's dumping of White's play became a cause celebre, and although the university's production was only partly professional, it attracted national and international attention -- and praise.

What does Muggleton think of the rejection of The Ham Funeral? "I think it's hysterical," replies the effervescent performer. She believes the festival's board of governors would have been further put off by the script's reference to abortion (it concerns a fetus and a bin). And she adds: "Back then, they didn't want to see an older woman racing off with a younger man. Let's face it, they still don't."

The new production is to be directed by STCSA boss Adam Cook. The production team has designed a fat suit for Muggleton that has a Dolly Partonesque bust, cinched waist and padded bottom. "They have created the most amazing fat suit," she says. "It is so voluptuous -- it really is. I do not have very big breasts. My own breasts kind of sit on top of the thing they've made and I look enormous. It looks like a G cup or something!"

Part vaudeville, part black comedy, part poetic reverie, The Ham Funeral is set in early 20th-century London. It deals with an introverted poet's struggle to engage successfully with life and to mature as an artist; he is torn between the animal lusts of his landlady and the abstractions of his subconscious, or anima.

Muggleton says that in writing this insistently non-naturalistic play 65 years ago, White was ahead of his time, and may have influenced Orton and Pinter. "You can't help but think that those writers had a look at Patrick's work, which was very ahead of its time . . . there are so many layers in this. We just keep peeling it like an onion every single day in rehearsal."

The actor is clearly relishing the role of Mrs Lusty, and often answers my questions by reading from the script in an accent as authentically Cockney as jellied eel. "She's not only lusty, she's a juicy role," she says. "I read the play and my heart leapt." While Mrs Lusty is aptly named, Muggleton sees her as a partly tragic figure who genuinely mourns the loss of her only child and spouse. "I think she's tragi-comic, completely," she reflects. "She is a woman who is yearning to be loved."

Confronted with a dearth of stage and screen roles for middle-aged women, many actresses are forced into semi-retirement by their late 30s. Yet Muggleton has enjoyed a steady stream of high-profile theatre work throughout her career. She puts this down to her willingness to travel and to play characters others might baulk at. Indeed, she says some actors would have refused to wear a fat suit to play Mrs Lusty, who at one point likens her face to a "stewed rag".

Muggleton says: "I suppose I love exposing myself as an actress and a human being. I'm not afraid of delving into those dark places, those ugly places, those naughty places that you have to do as an actor . . . I want to push my physicality and my spirituality into those places, just to see if I can get away with it."

The British-trained actor has played an exceptionally diverse range of roles, from her award-winning turn as Maria Callas in Masterclass to a cold-blooded crime matriarch in the TV drama City Homicide -- a part that garnered her an AFI award nomination in 2008. She has also won two Helpmanns and a Green Room award.

Earlier in her career, she stripped off in the crowd-pleasing dramas Steaming and Shirley Valentine and in 2010 she got her kit off again in Calendar Girls. She says airily that she was required to carry off full-frontal nudity in the first two of those plays "so Calendar Girls was nothing to me in that I was covered in the most glorious red orchids."

Muggleton trained at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Academy of Dance, before emigrating to Australia in 1974. After starring in Prisoner she didn't work in TV again for 20 years; she attributes her absence from the small screen to being booked up, a year or so ahead, with theatre roles. Even so, she is keen to do more television work, including soap operas.

When her acting schedule allows, she helps runs a drama school in Sydney's north, where she is based. "I love teaching," she says. "I'm reaching an age where it's wonderful to pass on what I've learned." Now in her 50s, she jokes she is beyond the "dangerous" 40s. She refuses to reveal her exact age because she believes this "can destroy careers. If they (producers and directors) see that you're a certain age, they say, 'Oh no, she's too old for this and too old for that.' When I was young I played much older characters than I was and got away with it . . . and I'm now playing younger than I am and I'm getting away with it.

"There will be a time when I won't, but I am getting away with it. I'm very lucky."

The Ham Funeral opens at Adelaide's Odeon Theatre on March 1.