Our Country’s Good (revisited)

The Lyric Hammersmith has revived this wonderful play by Timberlake Wertenbaker. It’s the third time I’ve seen it. The first was at the Royal Court in 1988 (marvellous) then at the National Theatre in 2015 (not quite so marvellous: for a play about the while colonisation of a black country it was bizarre in my view to cast a black actor as Governor Philip) – I reviewed it here – and now at the Lyric.

Our Country’s Good poster

When I heard the playwright was revisiting the play in the light of changing circumstances – or rather changing perceptions of the same circumstances – I was afraid she might be adding some anachronistic post-colonial-guilty touches to the play, but of course I was wrong. This production has a true Aboriginal woman (Naarah) playing the Narrator – quite a coup – but otherwise the changes are subtle.

Based on Thomas Keneally’s book The Playmaker, itself based on a true story, it tells the tale of First Fleet convicts in the new and as yet unbuilt colony of New South Wales attempting to mount a performance of The Recruiting Officer.[1] The play is the brainchild of the King’s representative Governor Philip in the hope that the ‘redeeming’ nature of theatre will provide the convicts with distraction and hope. He hands the reins to Lt Ralph Clarke, an upright, uptight young man who yearns for his wife left back home until his head is turned by one of the lady convicts.

For anyone unfamiliar with the play the cast doubling might be a tad confusing, especially since all the actors do to indicate the change is don a red coat (marine) or a torn shirt (convict). In an all-round strong cast the stand-out performance, for me, is Finbar Lynch, doubling as the quietly menacing Major Robbie Ross (red coat) and the reluctant hangman convict Ketch Fletcher (no red coat).

It is a play about redemption through theatre, but it is never sentimental or heavy-handed. Convicts sent to New South Wales were all petty felons, transported for – in the case of my three times great grandmother – stealing a petticoat, or my three times great grandfather who was given 14 years for handling forged banknotes: the sort of crimes that nowadays would earn a person a suspended sentence. What is so marvellous about this play is the way in which Ms Wertenbaker manages to weave the story of the early days of colonial Australia so deftly into the action; how the colony nearly starved, which is why stealing food was punishable by hanging; the humanity and sanity of the (possibly atheist) Governor Philip and his cohort David Collins. (I did take issue with the portrayal of Watkin Tench, who I always had down as an effete, witty, humane man rather than the flog ‘em and hang ‘em fellow he is here; and he would not been seen dead in a pair of grubby shorts.)

The setting (Gary McCann) is a sloping scrub with trees which in Act Two have been chopped down and the stage strewn with rubbish. A nice touch. The lighting (Paul Keoghan) is bold – often the entire rig is lowered almost to head level – and hugely evocative; the final moment when the stage is bathed in red light took me right back to the land of my ancestors. The director is Rachel O’Riordan.

It is a truly lovely play: funny, moving, intelligent, thoughtful, thought-provoking. I’d love to see a sequel. What happened to these poor creatures? Maybe their descendants are now living in million dollar apartments overlooking Sydney Harbour. It’s more than possible.


[1] For my review of the National Theatre production I looked for reports of the production in the journals of Ralph Clarke and Davy Collins and found only a passing mention.

Our Country’s Good

In 1789, barely a year after the First Fleet of convicts and marines arrived in New South Wales, the governor, Arthur Phillip – who was a remarkable and unusual man – made the remarkable and unusual suggestion that the convicts stage a play. The chosen piece was ‘The Recruiting Officer’ by George Farquhar, and the chosen playmaster was a junior officer called Lieutenant Ralph Clark.

National Theatre programme
National Theatre programme

Out of this unusual and remarkable story the playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker crafted a funny and moving play called Our Country’s Good, adapted from Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker and first produced at the Royal Court Theatre back in 1988. Now the National Theatre is giving the play a welcome revival, but maybe it was the vastness of the Olivier stage that dissipated much of the intimacy of the relationships at the heart of the play, or the slow pace of the action (it was a second preview), but somehow the joyful, redemptive play that I remember from all those years ago was not as moving or as funny as I was expecting.

The director has made the unusual decision to cast Afro-Caribbean actors in the roles of Governor Phillip and the witty and elegant Watkin Tench. I am all for colour-blind casting but since this is partly a story of the colonisation of a black country by a white one, in this instance it is just confusing. The aboriginal community is represented by one actor (one more than in the BBC TV series ‘Banished’), who observes, and dances, and eventually speaks his thoughts (in cultured English, another jarring note).

Governor Phillip (wikipedia)
Governor Phillip (wikipedia)

But all power to the actors, and in particular to Jason Hughes (Midsommer Murders) who manages to turn the uptight, slightly humourless Ralph Clark into a warm and interesting human being; and to Lee Ross, who takes on the role of the ‘thespian’ Sideway and makes him both hilarious and totally believable. The music is an unusual (and remarkable) mix of gospel, slave-song and guitar, with just the right mix of didgeridoo – previously recorded in Australia I believe.

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(wikipedia)
(wikipedia)

In preparation for seeing the play I have been re-reading Keneally’s book. He calls it a novel, but more surprisingly he states that ‘All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental’. However virtually all his characters, from the governor and his bad-tempered deputy Major Robbie Ross to the convicts Robert Sideway and Mary Brennan – who Clark casts in his play and with whom he later had a child – were not only real people but are represented by Keneally pretty accurately.

In his Author’s Note Keneally acknowledges ‘… that in making this fiction he found rich material in such works as ‘The Journal and Letters of Lt Ralph Clark … and David Collins’s An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales’. Out of idle curiosity I glanced through both of these to find that while Clark kept intimate diaries of some of his early years in the colony the relevant period in 1789 is missing. And all Collins has to say about it was: ‘The anniversary of his Majesty’s birth-day … was observed with every distinction in our power; … the detachment of marines fired three vollies, which were followed by twenty-one guns from each of the ships of war in the cove … and in the evening some of the convicts were permitted to perform Farquhar’s comedy of the Recruiting Officer, in a hut fitted up for the occasion. They professed no higher aim than “humbly to excite a smile,” and their efforts to please were not unattended with applause.’[1] (They did love their double negatives in those days.)

So all power to Thomas Keneally and to Timberlake Wertenbaker for drawing to our attention such a remarkable (and unusual) event in the earliest days of the colony. And to the National Theatre for transporting us temporarily to that remarkable and much-ignored (in this country) continent.

Finally – a note to the programme compilers: Norfolk Island is not off the coast of Tasmania.

Patsy Trench, August 2015
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[1] An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Chapter VII. http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/ozlit/pdf/colacc1.pdf