“Our Country’s Good” at Lyric Hammersmith

Jeremy Malies in west London
15 September 2024

“You can pretend you’re her!” “No, I have to be her – that’s acting!” I’ve seen at least ten productions of this wonderful play, and that line still speaks to me every time.

The company.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

This is a metatheatrical piece from 1988 by Timberlake Wertenbaker based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker of the previous year. It shows (based on documented events) a set of convicts in New South Wales in the 1780s mounting a play, The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar, which had been on at Drury Lane shortly before the British marines and their charges set sail for Australia.

Rachel O’Riordan’s direction stresses one of Wertenbaker’s main arguments, that a theatre project is a mini-community of its own. Do a play while one of your cast is recovering from a flogging and another is sentenced to hang, and the stakes are raised! O’Riordan also has the good judgement to drive the play from within; as Farquhar’s Restoration comedy gathers momentum, the dynamics between jailors and convicts are ramped up.

Our Country’s Good can be seen through the inevitable colonial lens if you want and the writer gives directors latitude here. O’Riordan judges this precisely as the British officers describe indigenous peoples as “savages” or “Indians” and say they lack all ambition in their “brittle burnt-out country”. But this is only a subsidiary theme.

The Aboriginal Australian character Killara is played by Naarah, a woman from the Kimberley who has a choric function. She is in modern dress which is appropriate since her character is looking in across many generations. She is not so much an individual as an embodiment of Australia. And there are no patronizing lazy devices such as a didgeridoo here in Holly Khan’s music which features bowed instruments and discordant sequences. The music is ominous and reflects the corporal punishment on the boat during the voyage out (essentially it’s a slave ship) and the threat of executions in the colony.

Once the play starts, there are good gags about who among the convicts is truly reading their lines and who has committed them to memory with the help of a friend.

There is topical commentary to the effect that prisoners (and there is a range of classes and education among the convicts) will always become what society at large and governments say they are. But acting in a play can help people rediscover their better nature. Wertenbaker’s technique allows her to keep this argument within the Newtonian physics of a seamless play and she never preaches.

A few things misfire totally or have less impact than I expected. Catrin Aaron as Liz Morden, the most ornery of the convicts, overplays this trait and often descends into rants that suggest Catherine Tate’s character Lauren. Confronted with imminent hanging, I expected her to say: “Am I bovvered?” When Aaron is measured by hangman Ketch Freeman (Finbar Lynch) a signature scene fails to ignite though Lynch finds a lyrical strain with his boyhood memories of theatre companies visiting his village. He is also powerful as the vicious and intractable Major Ross.

Gary McCann’s set gives an impressionistic suggestion of the hostile Outback on a steeply raked stage. He shows us expanses of sandbanks and salt pans as well as sterile clay that seems to throw up the searing heat. I don’t quite understand why the officers are drinking Foster’s lager tinnies and think it would confuse young people. But I get it that authentic props throughout (loose-leaf parchment for play texts, quill pens, etc.) would slow down the action. Paul Keogan’s lighting has a spectral quality such that we can imagine Duckling (Aliyah Odoffin) seeing the ghost of her dead lover Andy or Killara thinking that all of this is a dream.

There is nothing mannered here (apart from a convict imitating Restoration actor Thomas Betterton which is of course the point). O’Riordan has actors mooching with their hands in their pockets and helps them to acquire detail gradually. It’s naturalistic acting that is mirrored by the characters’ own discussion of how to act such as the excellent Ruby Bentall (as Mary Brenham) pondering how she should hold her head when pretending to be a man in the Farquhar play.

Nicola Stephenson (known for Brookside and Holby City) plays Dabby Bryant. Stephenson has appeared with the RSC and at the National, but I wish she would do more stage work. Here, she injects her peculiar brand of magic as she spins the mood of the whole theatre when Bryant recognizes herself in one of Farquhar’s male characters and demands to play him: “That’s about me, that’s my story!”

With prison overcrowding making headlines (and the prospect of prison ships or prisoners being sent to Rwanda or Estonia) there are topical elements here. A line addressed to John Wisehammer played by Harry Kershaw is another topical jolt. “You’re Jewish aren’t you? You’re guilty!” Earlier, Kershaw has been part of a scene with Bentall featuring analysis of word meanings and relish for euphony. Kershaw’s character takes us on a tour of the “A–M” volume of Dr Johnson’s dictionary which he appears to have swallowed whole. It’s one of many exquisite moments that has stayed with me.

Wertenbaker’s background as a classicist often peeps through to good effect. We are reminded that the Greeks regarded attending and paying careful attention to a play as a mark of good citizenship. One question of presentation puzzled me. At the end, we see the convicts perform the opening scene of their play front-on when usually they have their backs to us and it’s up to us to imagine the audience of marines and prisoners. But this approach works.

Our Country’s Good is (justifiably) a staple set text for school English literature. The Lyric Theatre – it has a successful outreach programme – will soon be flooded with curriculum audiences. In an age that has seen cabinet ministers of the calibre of Gillian Keegan and Nadine Dorries in charge of education and the arts respectively as well as savage funding cuts, the way that the play argues for the transforming potential of theatre is timely. “The play may change the nature of our little society,” says Kershaw as he doubles up as Captain Philip.

And Morden’s “I’d take a leap in the dark sooner than turn off my own kind!” is a powerful statement about capital punishment. There is even discussion of social mobility (currently as bad as it was in the 1950s) when Lieutenant Ralph (Simon Manyonda) quotes Socrates to the effect that human beings have an intelligence which has nothing to do with the circumstances in which they are born.

“You can’t change the words of the play!” says Wisehammer. I’d take that as O’Riordan’s watchword too. No directorial ego or regietheater here; it’s a skilful, resourceful and impassioned treatment of a compelling work.