Of that persistent strand of plays about putting on plays, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s ‘Our Country’s Good’ is among the best known, and among the best. Adapted in 1988 from Thomas Keneally’s novel ‘The Playmaker’, it follows the first British colonists landing in 1780s Australia. Some are convicts who’ve been transported, some are marines sent to supervise and civilise. One soldier has the bright idea of putting on a play; so they debate, they rehearse, they put on Farquhar’s Restoration satire ‘The Recruiting Officer’.
That sets up loads of opportunities for jokes about theatre, and smart lines about plays, and it’s that self-awareness that director Rachel O’Riordan leans into in her chunky, slightly exaggerated production. All the acting is overacting, the cast pushing towards a shouty, almost absurd register, with some scenes turning into broad comedy as they all entertainingly take on multiple roles. They seem to want to constantly remind us they are actors putting on a production of ‘Our Country’s Good’.
Gary McCann’s set brings it out too: an undulating dune with stripped trees – ‘a brittle burnt out country’, as one character says – natural looking until you hear the plastic thump of the actors’ feet on it, and see the spotlights come slowly down from the sky.
That smart concept and boisterous comedy too often come at the expense of the play’s seriousness of purpose. The more harrowing scenes have to work harder to earn their power. There’s an important strand in here about rehabilitative versus punitive justice, of theatre as a great good, an improving force. In committing to the bit – keeping us aware of its artifice – O’Riordan sacrifices some of the impact of that idea.
What resonates really strongly, however, is the layering of the ways we stratify and ‘other’ people. Wertenbaker has revisited the text for this production, and the character originally called The Aborigine now has a name (Killara) and updated lines. She’s played in modern dress by First Nations actor Naarah, who enters between scenes to talk about the incursion from her perspective, and brings the textures of Dharug and Dharawal language into a play that’s often about English. Meanwhile the trees on stage are cut down, the sand spoiled with empty tinnies and crisp packets, like the aftermath of a beach party.
It remains a really rich play, playing with the idea of a company of actors as a mini society bound by its own rules of convention and belonging. O’Riordan’s production conjures beautiful stage pictures and smart ideas. But while the updated play has had some of its dust blown away, the production is too keen to impose its concept to get the minutiae right, and so it often feels a bit too slow and creaky.