Our Country's Good

Australia 1789. A young married lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country. With only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts, and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal...
Winner of the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award in 1988, and many other major awards, Our Country's Good premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1988 and opened on Broadway in 1991. 'Rarely has the redemptive, transcendental power of theatre been argued with such eloquence and passion.' Georgina Brown, Independent
It is published here in a new Student Edition, alongside commentary and notes by Sophie Bush.
The commentary includes a chronology of the play and the playwright's life and work as well as discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created.

Timberlake Wertenbaker was Resident Writer for Shared Experience in 1983 and the Royal Court Theatre 1984-85. She is best known for her play Our Country's Good (1988). Other plays include The Love of the Nightingale (1989), Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1992), The Line (2009) and Jefferson's Garden (2015) for which she won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Play 2016.
Sophie Bush is a Lecturer in Performance at Sheffield Hallam University and has previously taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Huddersfield and Manchester Metropolitan. Her doctorate, on the work of Timberlake Wertenbaker, was awarded by the University of Sheffield in 2011, and in September 2013, her first book, The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker, was published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

Commentary
Chronology:
­ A timeline of Wertenbaker's life and works, set alongside key theatrical, social and political events of the period.
Contexts:
- The 1780s: Attitudes to Crime and Punishment; The First Fleet and the Penal Colony of New South Wales; Theatrical Styles and Conventions; The Recruiting Officer
- The 1980s: Attitudes to Crime and Punishment; Theatre Funding; The Royal Court, Max Stafford-Clark and the 'Joint Stock Method'; The Playmaker
- Timberlake Wertenbaker
Themes:
- Guilt and Innocence; Punishment, Rehabilitation and Redemption; The Value of Theatre; Language, Silence and Voice; Colonialism
Dramatic Devices:
- Language(s): Regional Dialects; Articulacy and Inarticulacy; The Aborigine
- Episodic Structure
- Theatrical Style: Multi-roling and Cross-casting; Brechtian Aesthetic
- Options for Design
Production History
- A Timeline
Critical Reception
- Critical response, recognition and influence
- The Play Today
Academic Debate:
­ A brief discussion of academic responses to the play
Further Study:
A bibliography of texts for further study
- A discussion of Comparative Literature (by Wertenbaker and others)
PLAY TEXT - OUR COUNTRY'S GOOD