Our Country’s Good

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s adaptation of The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally is set in 1788 as the British Empire begins its penal colonization of Australia. The officers’ concerns about the unruliness of the thieves, pickpockets, adulterers and prostitutes who constitute the colony lead to the casting and production of a restoration comedy designed to civilize and elevate their prisoners as a community. As the rehearsals proceed we see the convicts, particularly the women, seizing hold of their roles in ways that unsettle the order of rank and entrenched codes of patriarchal and sexual domination. Our Country’s Good is an unstinting examination of the violence at the center of the carceral colonizing state. Yet it also invites the audience to consider the possibilities that theater itself offers for the recovery of voice, the assertion of character and the performance of freedom.