Dramaturgical Notes
by Delores Ringer
Director and Scenic and Costume Designer

Our Country’s Good is a fictionalized depiction of the first penal colony in Australia in 1788-89. The play is based on the historical novel The Playmaker (1987) by Thomas Keneally, which is in turn based on actual journals and other written accounts from that settlement. Our Country’s Good has love, death, comedy, profound thought, and contains language more suited to adult audiences.

The Story

The play begins with a brief scene aboard ship as a convict is being flogged. An Aborigine sees the ship sail into Botany Bay on January 20, 1788, and wonders what kind of dream this might be. The Aborigine reappears several times throughout the play as he comes to understand that this is indeed not a good dream. In the final scene he appears to be suffering from smallpox.

We are introduced to the benevolent Governor of the penal colony, Arthur Phillip, who believes, contrary to popular opinion, that convicts can be rehabilitated. When told that hangings are a popular entertainment for the convicts, Phillip suggests that a play might be a better way of entertaining them. Then we meet 2nd Lt. Ralph Clark, who sorely misses his wife, and who is looking for a way to gain favor with the Governor. Soon Clark is auditioning convicts for roles in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, to be presented to celebrate King George III’s birthday. Clark encounters bad actors, good actors, most with no experience, and many who cannot read.

The military officers debate the merits of theatre and the merits of this particular production. Some see an advantage in this socialization of the convicts, some think the theatre is the work of the Devil, some think it is a waste of time, and some simply don’t care. Clark and his motley cast proceed in their rehearsals, but under the duress of convicts who fight with each other, convicts who run away from the colony, convicts who get jailed, and the cruel Major Robbie Ross.

The convicts also discuss the merits of theatre as they learn to work together in the play, but theirs is a much more practical and first-hand discussion. Along the way they encounter love and death in their lives, but they learn to cooperate, to trust each other, and to love theatre. The play ends as their performance begins.

Themes

This play is often described as about the “transformational power of theatre,” but what does that mean?

Each of the convict-actors learns to expand his/her notion of self. As they learn to speak and behave like the upper-class characters they will portray, they learn that they are quite capable of acting like “their betters." They learn that class differences are culturally constructed, and that the gulf between the classes may not be so difficult to cross. They learn to imagine themselves as other than criminals condemned to the far side of the world. At the end of the play each is imagining a future for him/herself in a new society full of possibilities. The convicts also learn to work together and to form a community as they rehearse their play over time. They emerge from deprived, selfish, distrusting individuals to a group of people who can work together to make something they are proud of, who appreciate their own diversity, and who care about each other. This happens as circumstances in the convict colony as a whole do not improve or foretell a bright future.

But as the pre-eminent American director Anne Bogart says, "inside every good play lives a question." Playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker questions the uses and abuses of language as well as the uses and abuses of theatre in this play. She interrogates language and theatre as instruments of cultural imperialism.

Wertenbaker questions the power of language, but also celebrates the beauty of language. We hear the correct English of the British upper class, the “Slash” language of the gangs, or “criminal class,” and the spoken poetry of the character John Wisehammer. Liz Morden discovers the power in using the language of the upper-class officers--they listen to her only when she sounds like them. Ralph Clark uses his notion of poetic language to connect him to his wife and his home in England.

Although they share the same Cockney dialect, Duckling Smith uses her refusal to speak as leverage to control her relationship with Harry Brewer. Harry, who craves communication, tries to maintain the delicate balance between appropriate and inappropriate speech. And the upper class character Captain Jemmy Campbell demonstrates that inarticulateness can transcend social class and education.

The military officers’ discussions of the merits of the theatre in early scenes are rather theoretical discussions. The Governor argues that by learning a role in a play, especially a fine example of English literature with genteel characters, the convicts will learn to be compliant and complacent citizens of the King. He uses theatre as a way to colonize the convicts, just as disease, guns and the destruction of their environment will serve to colonize the Aborigines.

Later, as the convicts argue about what makes a good play and a good performance, a character wonders why a woman can’t play a man if she really is more like him? Doesn't the audience want to be challenged? Should the audience have to use their imaginations? Should plays show us life as we know it? Or something else? Should a play make you understand something new? These are questions the characters grapple with, and they are questions contemporary theatre artists grapple with.
All of the above are questions and ideas which spur our production.

Some Historical Notes

Apparently, of the people transported on the First Fleet to Sydney Cove in 1788, few were sent for their survival skills. Although Aborigines had led ecologically sustainable lives there for over 30,000 years, the first Europeans considered the land barely inhabitable, and they did not look to the Aborigines for either help or example. Until the Second Fleet landed nearly three years later they didn't know if they would survive or starve as their food stores dwindled and their attempts at farming met with little success.

The First Fleet brought 1,030 people: 294 military men, 548 male convicts, and 188 female convicts (or he-lags and she-lags, as they were called). Before they landed on January 20, 1788, forty-eight people died during the 252-day trip. Most of the convicts had committed minor crimes for which the standard punishment was 7 years transportation, with no guarantee of a return. Many of the jailer-soldiers, mostly Royal Marines, felt they had been sent in retribution for losing the war in America. A few of the officers were interested in studying the flora, fauna, and the Aborigines, and they considered this a great adventure.
Marine 2nd Lieutenant Ralph Clark was not one of those officers on an adventure; he deeply regretted leaving his wife and young son. He was, however, one of the most prolific writers of those first Europeans in Sydney Cove. He kept journals and wrote letters to his wife in England, which were not intended for publication. His journals display an awkward rupture between his limited education and the flowery, elevated language he attempted to use as he related to his wife. Interestingly, his relationship with the convict Mary Brenham was not acknowledged in any of his existent writings; we know of their relationship only through the records of the birth of their daughter, Alicia, in July 1791.

Historical records indicate the first dramatic production in Australia was The Recruiting Officer, a popular play of the period, written by George Farquhar and first produced in London in 1706. The play was performed in Sydney Cove by an all convict cast on the King’s birthday, June 4, 1789, directed by 2nd Lt. Ralph Clark.

Production History

Australian writer Thomas Keneally (whose best known book is Schindler's List) used the journals and letters of Ralph Clark, as well as materials written by David Collins, Watkin Tench, Arthur Phillip, Robert Ross, William Dawes and others to write his fictionalized account of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, The Playmaker (1987).

Keneally’s novel contributes to Australia’s reclamation of the penal colony past (“convict stain”) in the 1980’s. Up to then that element of Australian history had been little acknowledged or studied. The Fatal Shore (1986) by Robert Hughes, The Women of Botany Bay (1988) by Portia Robinson, The Playmaker, and other novels and historical accounts have contributed to Australians’ newfound pride in their roots.

After reading The Playmaker, Max Stafford-Clark of London’s Royal Court Theatre commissioned playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker to write an adaptation. Stafford-Clark wanted to direct a production of The Recruiting Officer in tandem with Wertenbaker’s new play, using the same cast and rehearsing both plays at the same time. His company of actors studied the novel and other historical sources, focused on particular characters, and improvised scenes which inspired Wertenbaker’s writing. Both plays opened in 1988, and Our Country’s Good won the Olivier/BBC award as London’s best play of the year. The British director and cast then took the production to Sydney, and productions of the play became popular all over Australia.

In America Our Country’s Good was first produced by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Remains Theatre in Chicago, and then the Hartford Stage. The Hartford Stage production was taken to Broadway in April, 1991, where it received six Tony Award nominations, including Best Play, and won the New York Drama Critics award as Best Foreign Play. The play has been widely produced in American regional, professional and academic theatres. Our Country’s Good is the best known and most widely produced play by Timberlake Wertenbaker.

The Playwright

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s background is as cosmopolitan as that of the variety of characters in her plays. She was born in the United States in 1951, and grew up in America and the French Basque region. She graduated from St. John’s College in 1966, worked as a writer in New York, and taught French in Greece. In 1970 she moved to London where she began writing plays and working with several small theatre companies.

Her plays often contain a “play within the play,” in which characters are seen to use theatre to say things they otherwise could not say, or tell a story or myth for a specific political purpose. Wertenbaker questions the potency of theatrical languages and the arts in contemporary culture, although her plays are often set in different time periods. The central characters are often unconventional women who question traditional women’s roles; and some male characters are also shown to question and transgress their culturally constructed identities.
Wertenbaker’s other plays include: New Anatomies (1983), Abel’s Sister (1984), The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985), The Love of the Nightingale (1989, produced at KU in the Inge Theatre in 1992), Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1992), The Break of Day (1995), After Darwin (1998), The Ash Girl (2000), and Credible Witness (2001). She wrote the
screenplays for film adaptations of The Children by Edith Wharton and The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. She has studied closely a number of great playwrights, having translated and adapted plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Pirandello, Maeterlinck, Anouilh, and Marivaux.

Our Production

Our Country’s Good has a structure used by many contemporary playwrights, a structure which is problematic for traditional theatrical production. The play has 22 scenes in its two acts, some short, some longer, often with a considerable time passage between scenes, and often with jumps from place to place. This is a structure common to contemporary film, as the camera can cut from place to place in an instant, and each location can be seen by the audience in full vivid detail.

In fact this “filmic” or episodic structure was used by Shakespeare, but his audience was not accustomed to seeing locations in full vivid detail. Contemporary directors and designers struggle with this problem of how to best mount these episodic scripts on stages without the flexibility of film, for audiences who are more accustomed to seeing exact locations. One answer is to design scenery that functions more like the Shakespearean stage. We see stationary unit sets designed to provide a variety of physical relationships for the actors, supplemented with moveable furniture and other small scenic pieces or props. The audience has to use their imaginations. And perhaps knowing the exact location of a scene is not so important.

In our production we felt it was more important to put our visual emphasis on the psychological conditions of these first white settlers. They are set down in an undefined wilderness, where nothing is like what they knew in England, Ireland and Scotland. Some look out from their insecure encampment and see wondrous curiosities, others see a dark and fearful place. We wanted to construct a malleable scenic space which could take on the way of seeing of whatever character was doing the looking.

The play was originally written for 9-10 actors who would play multiple roles, with lots of costume changes. This is another trait of many contemporary plays; the producers can hire fewer actors, making the play less expensive to produce. In our case, as an educational institution, we want to provide more rather than less acting opportunities for our students. But in the spirit of the play, the characters’ discussions about actors playing multiple roles and the audience using their imaginations to see different characters on one body, a few actors in our production do play multiple roles.

One common complaint about actors playing multiple roles is that it can be confusing, audience members can have a hard time tracking who the actor is playing in a particular scene. This complaint has been made about even the most accomplished professional productions, so we don’t want to blame this problem on the skill of the actors. We decided to use significant costume pieces as signs or icons for specific characters. Except for Ralph Clark, characters do not change costumes (though in reality they might, as the play encompasses about a year and a half). A certain hat or coat can designate a certain character, and all else is unimportant. Of course, in this play there are eight soldiers who wear similar uniforms, but we can find some differences among their costume pieces and hope the visual and character differences are strong enough.

With the exception of Black Caesar and the Aborigine, all of the characters are from the British Isles. A variety of British dialects are indicated, including Scottish, West Country, East Anglia, Cockney, Irish, and Received Pronunciation.

According to dialect designer and coach Paul Meier:

"It is a particularly challenging play dialectally, in that many of the characters are also players in The Recruiting Officer, and need to assume or attempt the dialects appropriate to their roles; and in that Our Country’s Good is a play about language, its uses and abuses, and calls for moment-to-moment dialect modification as characters pursue their objectives, conscious of “code-switching” as a stratagem for achieving them.

"Like the iconic costume pieces, a character’s dialect will help us identify him/her, but some characters will slip across identities as they negotiate new roles and new possibilities for themselves."

A Basic Bibliography

Timberlake Wertenbaker. Our Country’s Good. Woodstock, IL: The Dramatic
Publishing Company, rev. ed. 1989.
Thomas Keneally. The Playmaker. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Portia Robinson. The Women of Botany Bay. Victoria, Australia: Penguin, rev. ed. 1993.
Robert Hughes. The Fatal Shore. New York, Random House, 1986.
Tim Flannery, ed. The Birth of Sydney. New York: Grove Press, 1999.
Max Stafford-Clark. Letters to George. The account of a rehearsal. London: Nick Hern Books, 1989.
Anne-Marie Willis. Illusions of Identity. The Art of Nation. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1993.

Dr. Dorice Elliott, associate professor of English at KU, is an excellent source of information about Australian convict literature.