The Question of Liz: Staging the Prisoner in Our Country's Good

The Question of Liz: Staging the Prisoner in Our Country's Good STEPHEN WEEKS First performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1988, Timberlake Wertenbaker 's Our Country's Good is usually said to offer a strong defense of theatre - indeed, a celebration of its power - and, within the historical context of its premiere, to suggest the short-sightedness and social costs of Thatcherite cutbacks in arts subsidies. Yet this defense is more nuanced than is generally recognized, and the play's celebratory energies are everywhere qualified, revised, and deepened in ways I wish to address. To do so, I will weave together an account of Wertenbaker's treatment of subjectivity and agency in one of her principal female characters, the prisoner Liz Morden, with a complementary discussion of Stephen Greenblatt's theory of "subversion and containment "as a mode of power. Greenblatt's work on English Renaissance drama, particularly his essay "Invisible Bullets" from Shakespearean Negotiations, published in t988, has sparked considerable debate.' The essay formulates a somewhat notorious view of the modes of early modem power. "Subversion" and "containment" are key terms in this argument and will suffice as a label.' In essence, Greenblatt argues that subversion in Renaissance England could be both produced and contained as a function of state power and cultural orthodoxy. Despite an ingenious use of period materials, his argument has been widely discussed as a more general theory of power and its effects. Criticism focuses on its apparently totalizing view of orthodoxy; it seems to leave little room for resistance to power that is not always and already co-opted, since, he argues, subversion is produced by power to serve its own ends. Louis Montrose's The Purpose of Playing (1996) describes the controversy as a disagreement over "the nature and scope of the agency available to subjects of the early modem state, and the degree to which contestation of the dominant ideology and its institutions was possible and actualized."3 Montrose seeks to break down the binary of subversion/containment in order to fannulate a more flexible sense of power Modern Drama, 43:2 (Summer 2000) 147 STEPHEN WEEKS relations that allows for "subtle discriminations among the modalities of resistance and among their various conditions of possibility."4 The conceptual friction between Greenblatt and Montrose provides a useful point of entry into one of the richest and most dramatically engaging scenes in Ollr Country's Good: "The Question of Liz."s Liz Morden is the most intractable of prisoners. Captain Anhur Phillip, the Governor-in-Chief of the penal colony at New South Wales, calls her "[IJower than a slave, full of loathing, foul mouthed, desperate" (58). Yet he does not think her incorrigible, and he charges Ralph Clark, the director of the convict production of George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, with her "redemption " (58). [n "The Question of Liz" she is brought to a counroom in which she is given the chance to declare her innocence of the crime of theft, a hanging offense. She has been tried once before and has said nothing, refusing to confirm or deny the charges against her. This time, however, she tells the presiding officers that she did not steal from the colony's food stores - a declaration that liberates her from the hanging tree and allows her to take pan in The Recruiting Officer. [n effect, she chooses between scaffolds - picking the stage over the gallows, the spectacle of Restoration comedy over the spectacle of crime and punishment. As she leaves the courtroom, Captain Phillip expresses the hope that Liz will be good in her role. In replying, Liz ends the scene: "Your Excellency," she says, "[ will endeavour to speak Mr. Farquhar 's lines with the elegance and clarity their own worth commands" (83). The moment represents a victory for the convict actors and their work on The Recrlliting Officer because the question of Liz's fate had clouded their prospects for performance. Now that Liz has traded scaffolds, the show will at last go on. [n this sense, Liz seems to get the best of her interrogators in the scene, and her final line tends to read in performance as willy and...