Our Country's Good: Theatre, Colony and Nation in Wertenbaker's Adaptation of The Playmaker

Our Country's Good: Theatre, Colony and Nation in Wertenbaker's Adaptation of The Playmaker ANN WILSON In 1988, Max Stafford-Clark, the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, approached Timberlake Wertenbaker' and asked her to write a play based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker.' Wertenbaker accepted the commission, writing Our Coumry's Good' which, like its'source, deals with historically based material: the penal colony in Sydney Cove (Australia) where, in 1789, a group of convicts managed by Second-Lieutenant Ralph Clark produced George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer in celebration.of the birthday of King George m. While the themes of prison, of colony and, consequently, of the English nation are common to 'both works, Wertenbaker 's adaptation is concerned primarily with theatre as a means of liberating people, because it offers them the chance to envision a future in which they are free, and of creating a community of players which serves as a paradigm for this·utopian society. This focus on theatre and community marks a shift from Keneally's novel which is concerned with colony and, by extension, with relations of power which butrress the colonial enterprise. This radical shift occurs because Wertenbaker's adaptation simplifies many of the characters, most notably Ralph Clark and Arthur Phillip, the Govemor-inChief of the colony of New South Wales. In The Playmaker, Clark's and Phillip's personal relationships with the colonized - the convicts and the aboriginals - are extensions of their public roles as officers who are the agents of colonization; in Our Country's Good, both are represented as essentially good men under whose benevolent aegis the convicts produce the play, create a community and recover their humanity which gives them true freedom. The opening scene of Our Country's Good establishes the debased condition of the convicts' lives. Set on the transport ship bound for the penal colony, the play begins with Ralph Clark overseeing ' the flogging of a convict, Robert Sideway. After the beating is concluded, John Wisehammer, another convict, says: 24 ANN WILSON At night? The sea cracks against the ship. Fear whispers, screams, faUs silent, hushed. Spewed from our country, forgotten, bound to the dark edge of the earth, at night 'what is there to do but seek English cunt, wann, moist, soft, oh the comfort, the comfort of the lick, the thrust into the nooks. the crannies of the crooks of England. Alone, frightened, nameless in this Slinking hole of hell, take me, take me inside you, whoever you are. Take me, my comfort and we'll remember England together. (p. I) Through the depiction of Sideway's beating, the first scene establishes the brutal terms of the marines' power over the convicts; through Wisehammer's eloquent description of night on the ship, it establishes the profound sense of loss experienced by the prisoners who, having been convicted of petty crimes against property, were expelled from their country and denied a sense of belonging to the nation.. In this context, we shou1d remember that a nation does not exist as an absolute but is a construct of the imagination. As Benedict Anderson points out, to be a member of a nation is to identify yourself as sharing with other members of the community common bonds which mark that group as distinct and particular' For all who have been removed from the nation, either forcibly as were the convicts, or in fulfillment of the obligations to country, as were the marines, the experience of loss is acute. Many of the characters, beginning with Wisehammer, express an intense desire for England, now only a memory. Wisehammer's palpable, to say nothing of punning, desire to thrust "into the nooks, the crannies of the crooks ... and we'll remember England" is reiterated in various forms throughout the play. When Mary Brenham asks Dabby Bryant if she is remembering her lines, she says "No. r was remembering Devon. r was on my way back to Bigbury Bay" (p. 13). Later she continues, "I'm not spending the rest of my life in this flat, brittle, burnt-out country. Oh, give me some English rain" (p. 13). The punishment of being exiled has...