Our Country’s Good – Lyric Hammersmith, London

Writer: Timberlake Wertenbaker

Director: Rachel O’ Riordan

The backdrop is an enormous battered, rusting, and faded metal Union Jack. If Our Country’s Good is a new play to you, the sense of irony in this declaration is hammered home by this impressive visual emblem, part of the atmospheric set design by Gary McCann. Where are we? On a ship full of English convicts in 1787 being deported to the penal colony of New South Wales, Australia or “Devil’s Island.”

This Olivier-Award-winning epic play first staged in 1988, written by Timberlake Wertenbaker and based on The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally, is now studied as a school text from a post-colonial perspective. For the first time, since it was first performed, 36 years ago, Timberlake has revisited the play, collaborating with a First Nations consultant, Ian Michael, to honour and give voice to Australia’s First Nation people.

The expectation is of an intense theatre experience of self-flagellation and misery. This is realised in the opening scene, a visceral audio-visual whipping of one of the unfortunate convicts (no skin is touched) and here the bold lighting by Paul Keogan and intense music by Holly Khan deserves a special mention. But what starts with a long drawn-out and punishing scene soon morphs into something quite different.

When Second Lieutenant Ralph Clarke (Simon Manyonda) works with the convicts to put on a play, Farquhar’s satire, The Recruiting Officer, to earn brownie points from his boss, Our Country’s Good quickly switches into an entertaining and farcical tale. The Recruiting Officer was apparently the first play on Australian soil although this begs the question, what is a play? And this question is also part of Our Country’s Good.

It’s quite exhilarating and exciting to see so many performers on stage. A strong cast of 11 performers multi-role as naval officers in their three-cornered hats and gold braid – in charge of discipline, deployment, and executions – and then transform into a motley crew of shabby convicts, here for stealing biscuits or picking the pockets of theatre goers. But there’s no moral hierarchy. Despite the uniform, the officers include drunks, sadists, and predators.

As the play unfolds, the officers share views on crime, punishment, law, retribution, redemption, and salvation. The convicts too ruminate on their lot and consider whether hanging would have been a more favourable outcome. There’s a Dickensian, cartoony element to several performances who become caricatures or types of criminals – perhaps the downside of having a cast of 11, is you never quite get to feel great sympathy for any of them, although there’s lots of bawdy humour and endearing observations on life.

The presence of Killara, a Dharug word meaning ‘permanent’ or ‘always there’, is played by Naarah, this year’s winner of the Aboriginal NAIDOC Creative Talent of the Year Award and appears as a narrator spirit who sees all and speaks for the first world nations, which the British colonised, ransacked and almost annihilated. She gives weight to the story and an insight from the earth, land, water, air, and the indigenous communities. In contrast to the strident diktats of officers, and sometimes-impenetrable street vernacular of criminal slang, her voice, soft and lyrical, is a welcome relief when she wafts on stage to share an entirely different language and truth.

The colonial/ post-colonial element is well served on this historical-specific stage but there’s a more universal message in Our Country’s Good about the human soul, how it can be crushed or raised. The terrible play within the play offers release, voice, expression, and a shared goal. Mary Brenham, played by Ruby Bentall, hangs her head in shame at the beginning but soon blooms into her boy’s breeches, learns to stride about the sands, to love herself and others – all through art.

Finbar Lynch, with his stern expression and Scottish commands, plays Ketch Freeman and tyrannical Major Robbie Ross, and is eminently watchable. He, too, is transformed through drama from dictator to dame. Jack Bardoe’s drunken and slurring Captain Jemmy Campbell meanwhile gives Oliver Reed a run for his money.

At 2 hours and 45 minutes (with an interval), Our Country’s Good is very long as epic productions tend to be, but you wonder if it has to be quite so long. There is no pressing question or urgency at the interval and because of that, it isn’t surprising to see some audience not return to their seats after the first half. But if you are prepared to settle in for the evening, this updated modern classic offers an immersive sweep of history and a pause for reflection.

Runs until 5 October. 2024