Our Country’s Good.

Adapted from Tom Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good boldly illustrates the harshness inherent in convict life in the inhospitable penal colony for which Governor Arthur Phillip was responsible at Botany Bay.  It also depicts, however fictionally, the governor’s ideal of having the penal settlement transform his prisoners into good citizens ready for egalitarian society rather than merely brutalise them.


So it is that Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark’s vague wish to mount a stage play strikes Captain Phillip as just the thing to improve the prisoners while celebrating the birthday of King George III.  Casting and rehearsals for the play The Recruiting Officer commence — but not every player has the self-discipline to listen, learn, and turn up.  And one of them is shortly convicted of complicity in theft from the colony’s meagre food supplies and sentenced to hang!


Our Country's Good sports many good lines, and, in depicting with some truthfulness the unforgiving world that the convicts found themselves in who had survived the journey from England, it offers welcome moments of light relief from intense, even overly intense, conversations.  It was a pleasure to see the actors' (surprisingly explicit) conviction in their characters in a land now foreign to us residents of the 21st century.


Quick changes between realistic costumes (sometimes on the fully lit stage) and some extraordinary alterations in speech distinguished well the naval officers from the convicts; in fact, it was a revelation to discover in the programme that Major Robbie Ross and convict James Freeman were played by the same actor, Maurice Downing.  With at least two roles for almost every player, though, some challenges remained in identifying who's who (a problem that might have been mitigated somewhat by using male actors for all the male characters).


Such potential confusions aside, REP's production of this fairly long play maintained audience interest and enthusiasm through creative set changes and, between entrances and exits, just the right pace, and is a timely reminder of the crucial difference that democratic values and simple empathy make in the lives of the great unwashed.

John P. Harvey

Buy the play script at Book Nook.

Image: [L–R] Maurice Downing, Kate Blackhurts, Rosangela Fasano, and Alexandra Pelvin, in Our Country’s Good.  Photographer: Helen Drum.