Our Country's Good Essay

Our Country's Good

In our second production, we had to explore the techniques of Stanislavski. Our Country’s Good is a play written by the British playwright, Timberlake Wertenbaker, who he adapted from Australian writer Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, which is based on historical facts. It was first staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 10 September 1988; the play is set in Sydney, Australia. It explores the very nature of theatre. The story concerns a group of Royal Marines and convicts in a penal colony in New South Wales. In the 1780s, convicts and Royal Marines were sent to Australia as part of the first penal colony as a punishment, who were mentored by an idealistic young officer – Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark. The play shows the different class systems and explores various themes such as sexuality, the Georgian judicial system and punishment. Keneally in his novel imagines what might have happened and creates a convincing picture of the colony and its citizens to make it an unbelievable project. Whereas Wertenbaker is more interested in telling a story rather than drawing themes from the actions like Keneally does.

Most of the characters in the play are based on real people who sailed with the First Fleet; however characters in the play have had their names changed. Also, the personalities and views of some of the characters don’t match details from the First Fleet. The timescale of the events has also been changed in the play.

One of the themes in the play is the Georgian judicial system; this was the hardest system in Europe. Many prisons in Britain were overflowing due to extremely harsh sentence for criminals from the public. The public weren’t concerned about giving severe punishment to major crimes such as murder but wanted sever punishments for those crimes committed against property such as theft.

Thomas Keneally thought of making Lieutenant Ralph Clark director of the play. In reality, Clark strongly disliked the convicts, specifically the behaviour of some of the woman, which he thought-out to be immoral. On the other hand, he had a relationship with a convict named, Mary Branham who is also known as Dabby; they had a daughter together, he named her after his wife, Alicia. In the play, Ralph’s objective is to stop the play however Captain Philip tries to convince him to carry on with the play.

I was given the character, Mary Brenham who is a shy character and the objective of Mary in the play is to help teach Dabby Bryant and Liz Morden their lines. She feels insufficient to play a noble lady, as she is ashamed of having sold herself to a sailor on the ship for food to feed Dabby and her husband.  With my group, we’ve worked together in rehearsals to develop our characters more and find their objectives in the play. We played around with the text and characters by exploring with different emotions for example, when I say ‘That was different. That was love.’Dabby Bryant, who is played by Dulce, calls Mary a whore but she doesn’t want to admit that so I act quite annoyed with Dabby for talking about the tattoo on my leg and I’m trying to explain to her that I’m not a whore for something I’ve done out of love. I use the gesture of crossing my arms and turning my back on Dabby.  Also, I emphasise on the word ‘her’ when I say ‘No. I have to be her.’ to show that I am very dedicated and want to do my best in the play. Later on when Stephanie comes on stage (who plays Liz Morden), my character acts quite scared of Liz because she is violent towards everyone but when Liz asks for help, Mary sees a soft side to Liz and helps her. 

Individually we all have different feelings towards each other such as Liz and Dabby hate eachother and Mary is the innocent peacemaker however, when it comes to the end of scene eight when Ketch Freeman comes to talk to the girls, we decided as a group to make all three of the girls come together and be against Ketch.