1990
Our Country’s Good
by Timberlake Wertenbaker
Melbourne Theatre Company
Playhouse, July, 1990
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
So tight are the copyright requirements for Our Country’s Good that before you can say Timberlake Wertenbaker you have been obliged to remember that the play is based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker. Drawing from historical documents, notably the journal of Lt Ralph Clark, the Playmaker, is an imaginative recreation of the staging on June 4th, 1789, of The Recruiting Officer, the first recorded theatrical performance to take place in the Penal Settlement of Sydney Cove. It is a lumpy novel, full of rich incident and lost opportunities. At the heart of the book is a splendid story weakened by digression and grandiloquence.
With Our Country’s Good, Timberlake Wertenbaker, playwright and dramaturg with the Royal Court, has taken The Playmaker and trimmed and whittled it into a new creation. In her version the play’s the thing. Gone are the ponderous dialogues between Ralph Clark and the Reverend Johnson, the officers are simplified almost to archetype and the convict players become pilgrims in a new world, inhabiting new selves, dramatically transmuted. It has a lean, elemental simplicity which resonates beyond its historical occasion.
Reinvigorated by Robert Hughes’ masterwork, The Fatal Shore, and current progressive learning theory, Our Country’s Good is a frankly wordy piece -part Socratic dialogue part dream play. Language denotes caste but it also spells liberation as the poet Wisehammer cobbles a new radicalism and Liz Morden breaks her defiant silence in acknowledgement that her commitment to the play is her bid to purify the dialect of the tribe. Almost gauche in its optimism, at times, Our Country’s Good verges on being a porridge Pygmalion, an intra-mural Educating Rita, but it has an intelligence and shrewdness that takes it beyond easy sentiment.
Director Roger Hodgman, in this judiciously unfussy production, presents a credible, suitably grimy, colonial setting without compromising the play’s larger discourse. Tony Tripp’s pale, cavernous stockade is at times unprofitably stark but flooded with Jamie Grant’s buttery lighting design it has a visual simplicity that permits the ensemble to shine.
And that is this production’s particular strength. The strong cast bring a clarity and unity to a work that might have scattered into set pieces. Even the necessities of doubling are turned to apt thematic purpose -Captain Phillip with Sideway, Captain Collins and Sidehammer, Reverend Johnston with Liz Mordern, Major Ross with Ketch Freeman- authorities with their nemeses, public virtue with its shadow.
As Phillip, Neil Fitzpatrick strikes the mean of rational jurisprudence towards which the guttering spirit of Philip Holder’s Ralph Clark inclines and against which the pugnacious cynicism of Bob Hornery’s Robbie Ross defines itself. Hornery’s Ross is suitably , horribly, vivid. He is the original snide screw, a crim with a whip and a whistle, while Richard Piper as Jemmy Campbell plays Smee, his buffoonish Caledonian echo. Piper is also memorable as Harry Brewer, the hangman with DT’s, haunted by the shade of Handy Baker and the silence from his faithless lag, Duckling, played with considerable presence by Sally Cooper.
Among the convict players Helen Morse’s Liz Morden has strength both in resignation and renewal and Jo Kennedy and Kim Trengrove as Mary Brenham and Dabby Bryant bring wit and energy to the rehearsal scenes. Robert Menzies is appropriately saturnine as Wisehammer and Neil Fitzpatrick, excellent as Phillip, is even more remarkable as Sideway.
With so much depth in his batting order, Roger Hodgman can afford to slow the pace and give the lines room. Wertenbaker’s literate text and hopeful themes deserve some air and with a cast as intelligent and accomplished as this, her play succeeds not only as historical penance but as a celebration of the fact that the theatre has plenty of juice left in it yet.
“Captivating” The Adelaide Review, No.79, August, 1990, p.23.