The venue recommended for the premiere of The Ham Funeral at the 1962 Festival was the University of Adelaide's Union Hall theatre. The Board of Governors had an agreement with the venue's management, the University Theatre Guild, to stage the Festival's productions of Australian-authored or small-scale new plays from overseas in this space. In the 1960s, Union Hall was what we would consider today to be an off-Broadway or fringe venue, attracting small but drama-literate audiences. The Drama Committee was confident that the proposal to stage the premiere would be accepted, if not welcomed, by the Governors. In the wake of the proposal's unexpected and hostile rejection, the Guild went ahead with the production three months prior to the Festival. The publicity around the rejection of the play ensured that the premiere was a gala social event, attended by Patrick White, local dignitaries, friends of White's and several interstate critics.

As the programme cover (Figure 2.1) indicates, the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust had come on board as an associate partner, and in doing so found itself co-producing a play it had originally refused to support. This triggered a sequence of events that saw the Trust under Hugh Hunt reject a proposal for a Sydney premiere, followed by the Adelaide Governors’ rejection of a Festival premiere. The Trust then partnered with the Guild to stage a University of Adelaide premiere, before being shamed into remounting the production in Sydney, leading Geoffrey Dutton to deadpan that Adelaide was ‘that home of second chances for plays of the first importance’.

The Guild premiere was a critical and box office success and an overall victory for progressives over the conservative establishment. Harold Tiderman, the Advertiser's theatre critic, proclaimed The Ham Funeral ‘a brilliant success’ and ‘a masterly achievement’ that drew a delighted response from ‘the capacity audience’. The News review focused on audience response, noting that ‘this seemingly substantial fantasy showed at its first performance last night that it could consistently hold an audience – an important point’. Roger Covell of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the play ‘generates emotion the most cosmopolitan of theatregoer would desire’.