Our Country's Good: Based on the novel 'The Playmaker' by Thomas Keneally

Description

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.

Wertenbaker has searched history and found in it a humanistic lesson for hard modern times: rough, sombre, undogmatic and warm * The Sunday Times * Highly theatrical, often funny and at times dark and disturbing, it sets an infant civilization on the stage with clarity, economy and insight. -- Charles Spencer * Daily Telegraph * Wertenbaker's play remains terrifyingly relevant ... Wertenbaker scarcely puts a foot wrong. She ... expands the argument about the practical wisdom of putting on a play into a wider debate about crime and punishment and, when an actor-convict on the eve of hanging breaks her self-incriminating vow of silence, movingly demonstrates the power of drama to change minds. -- Michael Billington * Guardian *