A Critical Analysis of Metatheatre, Colonialism, and Rehabilitation in Post-War British Drama
Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good (1988) stands as one of the most significant theatrical works of the late twentieth century, a play that masterfully interweaves historical narrative with contemporary political critique. This essay examines the play's central preoccupation with the redemptive power of theatre through multiple critical lenses: Foucauldian analysis of punishment and discipline, Deleuzian concepts of minor literature and deterritorialization, and postcolonial theory.
The play, set in an eighteenth-century Australian penal colony, traces a group of convicts who work together to produce George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer in celebration of King George III's birthday. Through its metatheatrical structure and its nuanced treatment of power, resistance, and transformation, the play offers a profound meditation on the social function of art. Wertenbaker presents theatre as a mechanism of rehabilitation that challenges the brutal punitive systems of both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, while simultaneously acknowledging the complicity of theatrical practice with colonial ideology.
The play's dialectical structure, the transformative journeys of its convict characters, and its subtle critique of Thatcherite cultural policies collectively construct an argument for theatre as a public space of discursive possibility and human dignity.
INTRODUCTION:
THEATRE IN CRISIS AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION
In 1988, when Australia celebrated its bicentennial, the history of transportation of criminals and the treatment of Australian Aborigines became an embarrassing memory. As Peter Buse points out, there was nothing worth celebrating about "the 'dumping' of thousands of criminals or the devastation of an indigenous population."
Timberlake Wertenbaker's play Our Country's Good was first performed in 1988, curiously coinciding with the bicentennial celebration, and offered an alternative form of commemoration—one that confronted rather than elided the uncomfortable truths of colonial history.
The play's premiere occurred against a backdrop of significant cultural and political crisis in Britain. On December 4, 1988, a conference on Theatre in Crisis was held at the University of London Goldsmiths' College, discussing the urgent issues facing mainstream theatre, fringe theatre, and the questions of alternative funding and subsidy.
This conference was the theatrical world's response to Margaret Thatcher's new art policies under which substantial cuts in the Arts Council's funding to theatre impaired British theatre and redefined its cultural status. The Conference Declaration emphasized the distinct and important role theatre has played in the full and free development of all cultural activity and asked for sufficient funding for the sustainability of theatre's vigorous social role.
Before this political gesture to champion theatre, Wertenbaker and Stafford-Clark made artistic endeavors to stress the power of theatre in their collaboration of Our Country's Good, premiering on September 10, 1988 on a double bill with George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer at the Royal Court Theatre.
An adaptation of Thomas Keneally's The Playmaker (1987), the play has earned a great deal of public acclaim and scholarly attention, garnering the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award, the Evening Standard Award for best play of the year, and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play.
The play questions not simply "Who and What is English," nor does it simply redefine "the Anglo-Australian connection" in the past, present, or future. Instead, Our Country's Good interrogates whose country, whose identity, and whose history, both by means of form and content.
Arguably, the play is characterized by a kind of metatheatrical minorization of the major, a subtraction of the official State representatives, such as history, power structure, society, language, and text. The play is characterized by a polemicizing of the sense of other spaces, and a form of threshold traversing that is rendered possible in the context of translation/adaptation and dramatic text/performance text in the theatre.
THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT
The First Fleet and the Penal Colony
Our Country's Good derives from real historical facts about the First Fleet's transportation of criminals from England to Australia to build New South Wales in 1787. Most characters in the play including convicts and officers are named after real people who sailed on the First Fleet. About 160,000 people, including men, women, and children, were sent to Australia and most of them were criminals.
Australia became a British penal colony and early Australian history started with convicts who created and cultivated their new state. This early period of colonial history is the "convict stain" of the Australian past because it reminds Australians that their country was built on unjust laws.
The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay in 1788 and after two hundred years when Australians celebrated their anniversary in 1988 they mentioned little about their colonial past and their bad treatment of Australian Aborigines.
Coincidentally or deliberately, Our Country's Good was premiered in London in 1988, which became another way to celebrate the anniversary and to commemorate this unforgettable past of Australia, as well as England.
The historical context of eighteenth-century justice is crucial to understanding the play's critique. Britain had a brutal and unrelenting capital punishment system in place. From 1751 to 1800, 1,400 people were hanged.
People were tried and convicted of basic crimes, such as stealing a loaf of bread, even if this was to feed their starving children. The Bloody Code was a list of crimes punishable by death. Surprisingly, along with treason, murder and rape, smaller crimes, such as burglary, or even stealing a rabbit could also send you to the gallows.
Justice in the eighteenth century was administered by local magistrates who were often volunteers from wealthy or elite backgrounds and always men. They would dictate if someone was guilty or innocent within their own parish.
However, more serious offences such as murder or rape would be submitted to the Crown courts. These courtrooms were very intimidating; often these trials would be held in Latin, and very few convicts had legal assistance. The cases would only last a number of minutes and then the criminal's fate would be decided.
Prisoners were already being transported to the USA as a method of punishment. However, as prisons were getting full, a new vision was decided. That new vision was to send convicts to Australia, a land at that time only inhabited by the aboriginals. A deadly land of soaring heat, dangerous animals and insects whose bite could kill in seconds.
Thatcher's Britain: The Contemporary Resonance
While the play is set in the eighteenth century, its immediate political context was provided by current events, specifically Margaret Thatcher's substantial cuts in arts funding. The parallels between the situation the convicts were in and Thatcher's society did not have to be looked for; audiences stumbled across them every moment.
Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. Under her government, arts were cut and the whole industry was commercialised as corporate sponsorship dominated the funding streams. Populist blockbuster plays, such as Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals took center stage.
Several writers took to writing controversial plays in direct response to the way the government was treating the arts. Wertenbaker was one of many leading writers who used this time to highlight the importance and the power of theatre and why it must remain in the hands of the people and not the corporations.
As theatre critic Michael Billington noted: "[In Thatcher's government], we saw a shift away from public subsidy to corporate sponsorship, a transformation of the Arts Council from an independent agency to an instrument of government, and the growth of a siege mentality in arts organisations."
Thatcher's emphasis on self-reliance and individualism marginalized the downtrodden and prisoners usually felt they were brutalized and discarded by society.
Prisons in the 1980s Britain were horrible, quite similar to the situation in the Victorian Age, when Newgate was overcrowded with prisoners committing petty crimes and large numbers of criminals were deported to Australia, a penal colony totally abandoned by the civilizing society.
Margaret Thatcher made her opinions about punishment and crime clear in these words: "We Conservatives know... even if many sociologists don't, that crime is not a sickness to be cured - it's a temptation to be resisted, a threat to be deterred, an evil to be punished."
A relevant aspect of Wertenbaker's play to its political context is the establishment's lack of belief in rehabilitation as a crime policy. Thatcher was a proponent of traditional punishment instead of rehabilitation, which is another reason for Wertenbaker's criticism of the dominant establishment.
DRAMATURGY AND STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS
The Diptych Structure
A sense of contrapuntal agon/debate is manifested in the structural arrangement of the play, which is composed of two acts, each with eleven scenes. In the fashion of a diptych—a hinged two-tableted framework—Wertenbaker has orchestrated such an agon as follows: "The Authorities Discuss the Merits of the Theatre" (Act I, Scene 6) is juxtaposed with "The Meaning of Plays" (2.7); "The First Rehearsal" (1.11) is counterpointed with "The Second Rehearsal" (2.5); while "The Question of Liz" (2.10) with the pre-show "Backstage" (2.11), to create a multiperspectival portrait of the minor theatre.
Most of the titles of the play's twenty-two scenes are related to the diverse twenty-two characters in different narrative contexts. Instead of framing one unified history around a single protagonist, Wertenbaker violates dramatic conventions by having subjects and narrative lines revolve around a heterogeneous set of characters.
Characteristically, the play is imbued with senses of hybridity, syncretism, multiplicity, and openness. Our Country's Good foregrounds a proliferation of the transnational, transcultural, multilingual, and multiethnic spatialities which are defined as much by what they lack as by what they include.
The Metatheatrical Dimension
The play's metatheatrical structure is central to its meaning. The convicts' production of The Recruiting Officer is not merely a plot device but a philosophical statement about the nature and purpose of theatre itself. The play-within-the-play structure allows Wertenbaker to explore questions of representation, identity, and transformation in a self-reflexive manner.
Sullivan has observed that "to act or not to act" is the overwhelming question of Our Country's Good. The convict production of The Recruiting Officer is the product of a wrestling for power. It is an experiment in social engineering and the theory of social contract. Set in an isolated, eighteenth-century colonial outpost, when a hierarchical but precarious order is struggling for its own survival, a theatrical project is proposed.
However, the play operates on multiple levels of theatrical reference. It does not simply present the convict production but also comments on its own status as a theatrical event. The backstage scene at the end of the play foregrounds this self-reflexivity. Weeks labels the scene as a "backstage comedy," which is pregnant with elements of self-reflexivity, such as the pre-show nervousness, the adjusting of costumes, the revising/cutting of the prologue, the role-playing, audience appeal, and so on.
What Wertenbaker aims to do is not to reproduce Keneally's The Playmaker, or to restage the performance of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer in the penal colony. Instead, by using "backstage" to end Our Country's Good, the playwright tries to emphasize that the convict theatre as the minor theatre not only ceases to represent or reproduce dominant ideology and power structure, but also contributes to the becoming of a minor consciousness.
Adaptation and the Workshop Process
The play's journey from page to stage involved a collaborative process that itself mirrored the convicts' theatrical production. The workshops involved the director, the playwright and the cast. They did the two productions simultaneously.
Rehearsing The Recruiting Officer at the same time greatly benefited them. The performers gained an understanding of the tastes of the eighteenth-century Britons, the acting and writing styles of the period and the challenges the settler-convicts had to confront to mount Farquhar's play.
On top of that, the company did a lot of in-depth research. They read Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, and the diary of Lieutenant Ralph Clark. They tried to examine a full spectrum of Georgian society and to understand injustice, discrimination, social violence, and isolation their characters would have experienced, and how the convicts' lives differed from their own.
In order to get access to the psychological recesses of the convicts and be immersed into the historical context, the actors improvised certain scenes, mainly concerning the theme of violence and the identity and personality of the convicts. Through improvising the scene of punishing the convicts, the actors and the playwright could have an acute understanding of the inner state of the convicts, which was conducive to creating round characters. Improvisation could also help find solutions to certain technique problems.
What was more beneficial to the playwright's and the cast's understanding of the power of art and the contemporary resonance of the history play was their visit to HMP Wormwood Scrubs and the interviews with the prisoners. This helped them to have a profound understanding of how prisoners felt about punishment, disgrace, and humiliation on the one hand and to witness how theatre had changed the lives of these prisoners on the other hand.
THE REDEMPTIVE POWER OF THEATRE
Theatre as Rehabilitation
Wertenbaker's revelation of writing the play to "explore the redemptive power of the theatre, of art, for people who had been silenced" is central to understanding her dramatic project. She believes that "art is redemptive and the theatre is particularly important because it's a public space. That's the crucial element. It's discursive and it's public. And there are very few of those spaces left."
The play demonstrates this theme through the transformation of the convicts as they engage in the theatrical production. Phillip proposes the idea: "The convicts will be speaking a refined, literate language and expressing sentiments of a delicacy they are not used to. It will remind them that there is more to life than crime, punishment." He argues that watching a play can help convicts cultivate "attention, judgement, patience, all social virtues."
As the play progresses, changes are brought about to the lives of the convicts when Ralph Clark, supported by the Governor Phillip, is going to produce a play. Convicts find dignity, humanity, self-esteem, and self-knowledge in staging the play, and awakened from the numbness of the wretched convict life, they start to have hope and dream for future.
Clark observes: "They seem to acquire a dignity.... They seem to lose some of their corruption." Such changes become more noticeable when the convicts are devoted to rehearsals. Besides developing self-esteem, the convicts find solidarity among themselves and fight against the brutality of the officers.
The Transformation of Individual Characters
The regenerative power of theatre is best demonstrated through the transformation of Liz Morden, who decides to speak up for herself right before she is sentenced to death. Drama empowers her and makes her voice heard. Liz is a fictional character; she is the artistic result of the actors' and playwright's interviews with the prisoners.
Rehearsing the play helps Liz find her lost voice and she dares to clear herself of the mischarge. The power of language, "as a means of self-expression and self-determination," is probed into in the play. "Deprivation of language is spiritual death." By regaining her voice, Liz has a renewal of life both physically and metaphorically.
Liz's transformation is the most powerful demonstration of theatre's redemptive power. It is also a significant example of how the convicts transgress the boundaries of oppressive silence. When she defends herself, the gaolers believe an honest convict over and above the word of a drunk and uncertain officer. The power of language, as a means of self-expression and self-determination, is probed into in the play.
Mary's transformation is similarly significant. Mary is a girl lack of confidence. She hates being a mistress of the officer, and yet that is her only way to raise her child. Playing Silvia enlightens her to the possibilities that women are entitled to and what love really means. Mary gradually grows into an independent and assertive woman and she finds the courage to live with Clark, the man she loves.
For Arscott, acting gets himself temporarily away from misery, imprisonment, slave life, punishment, and hostility. He says: "I don't want to play myself. When I say Kite's lines I forget everything else. I forgot the judge said I'm going to have to spend the rest of my natural life in this place getting beaten and working like a slave... when I speak Kite's lines I don't hate any more."
Sideway is enlightened to the injustice they have suffered at home; Wisehammer finds his potential in fantastic imagination and his sensitivity to words. He looks forward to starting a new life with Mary in the colony. Wisehammer declares: "I don't want to go back to England now. It's too small and they don't like Jews. Here, no one has more of a right than anyone else to call you a foreigner. I want to become the first famous writer."
The Convicts' Resistance Through Mimicry
The convicts' resistance to the colonizer is carried out in mimicry, a very effective means acclaimed by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha. Mimicry is a mocking, distorted and destructive mimesis, which aims to subvert the authority of the colonizer. Rehearsing the play empowers the convicts and enables them to fight back.
When Major Ross humiliates and insults Mary, Sideway and Liz start to rehearse boldly, insinuating the injustice they have suffered. By speaking the lines from the play, they defy and rebel against authority.
This is the fleeting moment when Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer—the King's literature and language—is used as an act of resistance. It is the first attempt of the underground stems, also known as rhizomes, which try to connect themselves with the roots or the trees of the majority to put them into strange new uses.
Wisehammer's mimicry of Farquhar's prologue is the most explicit example of this resistance. Discovering that Farquhar's prologue does not "make any sense to the convicts," Wisehammer imitates the tradition of prologue at the beginning of the play to scorn British imperialism and to justify his being in Australia as well.
His ability to use a proper language turns out to be a weapon to resist the British government: "From distant climes o'er widespread seas we come, / Though not with much éclat or beat of drum, / True patriots all; for be it understood, / We left our country for our country's good."
FOUCAULDIAN PERSPECTIVES ON PUNISHMENT AND DISCIPLINE
The Dialectics of Punishment
Michel Foucault's analysis of punishment and discipline provides a valuable framework for understanding the play. Foucault traces the history of punishment from public execution to imprisonment, from the punishment of the body to the punishment of the soul. In the play, there is a continuous debate among the officers concerning the true nature of punishment as to whether it should be punitive or rehabilitative.
Major Ross, Captain Campbell and Captain Tench support the application of more cruel means of punishment. These officers represent the "disciplinary power" in Foucauldian terms as they stand for both colonial and juridical power in the play. On the contrary, Phillip, Collins and Ralph Clark support penal reform and offer the possibility of rehabilitating convicts with a theatrical performance.
Foucault observes a move from public execution to sentences that intend to correct and improve as the main socio-economic system shifts from feudal/archaic to industrial/modern. According to his analysis, corrective sentences address the soul of the condemned instead of the body which is the primary target in public execution.
In his words, as time passed and economic structure shifted from the aristocracy to the bourgeois, "a few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared."
Foucault's proposal of penal reform requires that detention be a means for transformation of individual behaviour: "Penal detention must have as its essential function the transformation of the individual's behaviour." What is formerly known as penal detention that is more related to corporal punishment should now be altered with carceral transformation, alluding to the corrective function of more humane punishment practices.
The Punitive City and the Spectacle of Punishment
There are several instances in the play in which the dialectics of proper punishment might be observed. In Act 1, Scene 3, the authorities treat an 82-year-old woman cruelly and punish her with death penalty. Harry reports: "There is also Dorothy Handland, 82, who stole a biscuit from Robert Sideway." The worry in the process of wait for severe punishment leads the character to commit suicide.
As the punishment is carried out according to the torture system, even a minor crime is responded with a grave punishment directed at the elimination and exhibition of the body of the convict.
Foucault sees cruel punishment as a form of public spectacle and calls the arena in which this practice is held as the punitive city. In this case, the convict-ship serves as a punitive city where authorities execute the law in accordance with traditional torture methods publicly. The convict-ship is an "open-air prison," a metaphor that finds a correlative in Wertenbaker's play.
Ross's treatment of Sideway and Dabby exemplifies the spectacle of physical punishment. He whips Sideway and displays his scarred back, and he makes Dabby go down on all fours and bark like a dog. Ross's dehumanising attitude forms quite a contrast with the more humane treatments of Governor Phillip and Lieutenant Ralph Clark.
Theatre as Discipline
In Foucault's analysis of discipline, exercise and training are key practices in the transformation of individuals. He argues that "exercise is that technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behaviour towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual."
Interestingly, Foucault already lists theatrical rehearsal as an exemplary corrective punishment method used in the past. The proposal to perform a play, therefore, has its roots in Foucault's analysis of the carceral system as a social function. Similarly, Phillip thinks that these people were involved in crime as a result of a lack of high education, thus, he does not hold them responsible but the circumstances in which they were brought up and offers to change this by providing them with an opportunity to be involved in performance arts.
The convicts are indirectly coerced into being better citizens through a performance that is steadily monitored by authority figures. Through the rehearsals, the convicts can recognize their own identities, which shows that they interiorize the instructive and liberating function of performance that Phillip and Clark wished for them. The change in behaviour and attitude can be explained with the argument that "the prison, though an administrative apparatus, will at the same time be a machine for altering minds."
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI: THE MINOR THEATRE
Toward a Minor Literature
The concepts of minor literature and minor theatre developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari provide another valuable framework for understanding the play. In their study of Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari mapped out a genealogy of minor literature. According to these critics, minor literature is a kind of work constructed by minorities within a major literature, such as when a Czech Jew writes in German, an Ouzbekian writes in Russian, or an Irishman writes in English or French.
A major literature is a literature of masters: oppressive, interiorizing, centripetal, and homogenizing. In contrast, a minor literature arises from the reactions of the minority within a major literature and culture, and moves to be a collective project of becoming, diversification, and deterritorialization.
That is, a minor literature shall not be merely identified with or restricted to any specific and actualized political or ethnic minorities; instead, it is to extend to any possible community in which there is no other master to be privileged, no other category to be followed. Instead, the minor literature works to demolish any single ethnic affiliation, or prefabricated cultural identity, and aims to induce "a series of variations."
The Minor Theatre
Mark Fortier further maps out the trajectory of Deleuze's and Guattari's movement from a minor literature to a minor theatre. Theatre is by nature engaged with an assemblage of more systems of expression than other literary genres, and thus offers more fertile soil for "minorization," for lines of flight away from "the hegemony of the word and verbal meaning."
Furthermore, theatrical adaptation, which involves a less constrained rewriting or a more radical restaging of an existing work, renders possible not only a process of "the unraveling of hegemonic structures of identity," but also a new assemblage of bodies, a new "haecceity," and a new becoming.
By means of theatrical adaptation and via a radical rewriting or restaging of an existing work, Our Country's Good offers more opportunities for the project of deterritorialization, and of the unravelling of fixed, hegemonic meanings.
In Our Country's Good, the convict theatre presents a collective of minority consciousness, which includes the European downtrodden Outcast (the convicts), the non-European colonialized Outsider (the Aboriginal Australian and Black Caesar the Madagascar), and the gender and ethnic victimized Other (the women convicts and Wisehammer the Jew). However, in terms of Deleuze and Guattari, such a project of becoming minor is open to everyone, and is not necessarily restricted to specific or actualized minorities.
The Burrow Space of the Convict Theatre
Wertenbaker's convict theatre functions in some ways similar to Kafka's version, or Deleuze's and Guattari's concept, of the "burrow." According to Deleuze and Guattari, the burrow is an example of a rhizome; it is a structure of escape, and within it nothing is "beautiful" or "loving" as there are "underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes."
For Deleuze and Guattari, to be "rhizomorphous" is to "produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses." Wertenbaker's convict theatre maps out a rhizomorphous negotiation of space, a process of territoriality between the major and the minor.
Major Ross bitterly yet acutely points out the subversive burrow space that is created by the "two-hours-rehearsal" within the rigid constraints of penal authority. The license for rehearsal and for playmaking obviously encourages "renegade escapade," as well as various kinds of contestation of orthodoxy within an absolutist regime.
The backstage scene at the end of the play actualizes a Nomadology, which is an alternative to and the opposite of the authorized representation of the State. The backstage is not a world to reproduce, but a burrow space in which to assemble in nomadic heterogeneity to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities of lines of flight.
POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
Travel and Empire
Travel and empire go hand in hand: travel not only conveys imperial discourse but also makes the establishment of a colony overseas possible. Travelers are usually "monocular," explaining everything in the colony through a "Eurocentric" perspective. This travel is what Steve Clark calls "one-way traffic" because "the Europeans mapped the world rather than the world mapping them."
In the context of colonialism, travelers are like the colonizers who consider the colony as inferior which is ready to be dominated. In Our Country's Good, Clark calls Sydney Cove "iniquitous shore" and Major Ross even claims that "I hate this possumy place."
After the English travelers arrive at Australia, the first thing they do in the play is to shoot birds. Their hunting represents symbolically a coercive domination: regarding the land as their property, these travelers do not know how to admire or respect the creatures in it or the landscape.
Two kinds of travelers' narratives especially affirm imperial discourse: "the discourse of the civilised other" and "the discourse of savagery." Since travelers are Eurocentric, considering the colony as inferior, there is no doubt that they see the people in the colony as savages and they, as "noble" Europeans, have a mission to civilize those barbaric people.
The Aborigine's Counter-Discourse
A character named the "Aborigine" in Our Country's Good is what European travelers call "savages" and the people they are going to civilize. The designation "Aborigine" contains a pejorative connotation "considered by many to be too burdened with derogatory associations" because of "the feeling that the term fails to distinguish and discriminate among the great variety of people."
The Aborigine delivers four soliloquies without talking with people, a character without name and gender. Her monologues show a strong eagerness to narrate her own history and they represent the Other's counter-discourse against British imperialism. In her monologues, The Aborigine describes her reaction toward the coming of English people from disregard to disillusion.
In Act One, Scene Two, the Aborigine portrays the coming of English people that embodies Western civilization as a big giant canoe, murmuring, "A giant canoe drifts on to the sea, clouds billowing from upright oars. This is a dream which has lost its way. Best to leave it alone." The dreamlike scene of the arrival of the First Fleet is incomprehensible for the Aborigine, so she thinks the best way is to ignore it.
However, when she appears the next time, she starts to wonder about the meaning of the dream which represents the arrival of English people. She ponders: "Some dreams lose their way and wander over the sea, lost. But this is a dream no one wants. It has stayed. How can we befriend this crowded, hungry and disturbed dream?"
Not until the Aborigine is going to die like her dead ancestors does she realize the dream is a cruel reality rather than fantasy. Her final appearance shows in Act Two, Scene Eleven, and she reports, "Look: oozing pustules on my skin, heat on my forehead. Perhaps we have been wrong all this time and this is not a dream at all." Her horrible appearance predicts her coming death and her body represents a living attack on British colonialism.
The Colonized Travelers
There are two groups of travelers in the play: one is the traveler as the colonizer such as the officers and the other is the traveler as the colonized such as the convicts. Different from Eurocentric travelers who see everything in the colony through the lens of imperialism, the colonized travelers re-consider themselves and their mother country in Australia because of the sense of distance the travel brings them.
The structure of travel is like "the structure of rites of passages" and when travelers cross a boundary and enter another place their identities are shifting. This explains the "transformation" of the convicts in their "transportation" to Australia and their psychological and spiritual changing fulfills the structure of rites of passage: "rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation."
Wisehammer's transformation exemplifies this structure. He leaves England for Australia. In the first scene, he expresses his lament by crying "Take me, my comfort and we'll remember England together." Nevertheless, after arriving in Australia, Wisehammer gets a chance to perform on the stage and an opportunity to reconsider who he is. If theater provides him with the power of redemption and liberation, then it is travel that makes this performance possible and makes him change.
THE DIALECTICS OF THEATRE: DEBATE SCENES
The Authorities Discuss the Merits of the Theatre
Act One, Scene Six is the crucial debate scene in which Governor Phillip and other officers argue about the merits of the theatre. Phillip intends to impose the classically derived sense of order upon the colony and turn it into a civilizing community. For him, the European order is embodied in the great classics produced by the playwrights. Drawing on the Greek notion of theatre as an obligatory and unifying element within society, he remarks: "The theatre is an expression of civilization.... The convicts will be speaking a refined, literate language and expressing sentiments of a delicacy they are not used to. It will remind them there is more to life than crime and punishment."
Governor Phillip believes in nurture and thinks that watching a play can help convicts cultivate "attention, judgement, patience, all social virtues." When Tench thinks "the criminal tendency is innate," the Governor refutes that real plays with "fine language, sentiment" can uplift the convicts and it is important to "encourage them now to think in a free and responsible manner."
On the other hand, many officers hold the opposite view of theatre and of how to create a new society. Collins believes that "the quick execution of justice [is] for the good of the colony." Ross thinks theatre "teaches insubordination, disobedience, revolution." Tench argues that "a bunch of convicts making fool of themselves, mouthing words written no doubt by some London ass, will hardly change our society."
The Meaning of Plays
This scene is the counterpart to the first debate scene. Various characters bring different levels of commitment to their participation in the theatre. In this scene, the convicts are seen learning their lines for the play, and these lines are constantly interrupted or amputated by debased variations in a subversive manner.
Dabby criticizes Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer as "a silly play" with no "interesting people in it," and claims that she wants to see and to be seen in a play that shows life as people know it. Dabby even refuses to say the lines which she considers "stupid," while Ralph Clark, the steward of the major theatre, can only insist weakly, saying that "[it's] written by the playwright and you have to say it."
Wisehammer offers another prologue written by himself to replace Farquhar's. The original prologue is rather anachronistic, with lines such as "In ancient times, when Helen's fatal charm," and he feels that it "won't make any sense to the convicts." Farquhar's language is a literary language that is mired in a heavily Latinate/Greek vocabulary and origin; it is a "dead" English "buried" in the crypt of its classical roots.
Wisehammer therefore claims that "[a] play should make [people] understand something new." The convict theatre is undergoing the process of haecceity, as the convicts resist being subsumed by the literature of masters in the major theatre. Eventually, the convict theatre will become minorized for the convicts' own good.
THE QUESTION OF LIZ: SILENCE AND VOICE
The Refusal to Speak
"The Question of Liz" is one of the play's most significant scenes. Liz is brought before the colony court on charges of having stolen food, and she refuses to speak. The possible reasons for her silence may be as follows: she is guilty; or she adheres to the convict code of honour and does not want to beg for her life; or she no longer believes in the process of justice.
Her failure to speak in her own defense will be eventually taken by the court as an admission of guilt, and she will be condemned to death by hanging. Ralph pleads: "Morden, you must speak." Collins adds: "For the good of the colony." Phillip appeals: "And of the play."
Upon Phillip's appeal to speak for the good "of the play," Liz gives up her silence and adopts the eloquence of Farquhar's language to reclaim not only her own dignity but also that of the minor theatre before a group of delegates of the majority: "Your Excellency, I will endeavour to speak Mr. Farquhar's lines with the elegance and clarity their own worth commands."
Critical Interpretations
Some critics tend to praise this scene as the play's most triumphant moment in terms of the redemptive power of the theatre, or of the relationship between language and identity. Conversely, critics such as Esther Beth Sullivan argue that the scene symbolizes the willing subjugation of the dissidents to the dominant ideology of the ruling class. Sullivan maintains that Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer is the epitome of classical literature, and since it is performed on the occasion of the King's birthday, the convict performance is viewed as the emblem of imperialist recruitment.
However, the scene realizes the glory and the revolutionary force of the minor theatre: when Liz breaks her long silence and turns the courtroom into a theatre, it is the very realization of Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of "the utilization of English," the appropriation of the King's language by way of theatrical "exhilaration" and "overdetermination" in order to bring about minorizing reterritorialization.
Intriguingly, this scene involves Liz's questioning of languages, in terms of how to deterritorialize the major language. By becoming fluent in the major language, by "speaking English," Liz transforms Farquhar and his drama, which is as less the emblem of the major literature and more as pure material, and which is susceptible to the incessant appropriations or corrosions of meaning by the actor or audience.
THE BACKSCENE: TOWARD A MINOR THEATRE
The Crown of Minor-Theatrical Politics
The last scene may be regarded as the crown of Wertenbaker's minor-theatrical politics. The scene is titled "Backstage" and is pregnant with elements of self-reflexivity, such as the pre-show nervousness, the adjusting of costumes, the revising/cutting of the prologue, the role-playing, audience appeal, and so on.
Throughout the play, key lines or phrases from Farquhar are often repeated with variations. What Wertenbaker aims to do is not to reproduce Keneally's The Playmaker, or to restage the performance of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer in the penal colony. Instead, by using "backstage" to end Our Country's Good, the playwright tries to emphasize that the convict theatre as the minor theatre not only ceases to represent or reproduce dominant ideology and power structure, but also contributes to the becoming of a minor consciousness.
The backstage is the assemblage of previously blocked desires of the outside, of rhizomes, and of immanence. The "Backstage" scene actualizes a Nomadology, which is an alternative to and the opposite of the authorized representation of the State. Wertenbaker's backstage is not a world to reproduce, but a burrow space in which to assemble in nomadic heterogeneity to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities of lines of flight.
The Becoming of John Arscott
According to Deleuze and Guattari, fleeing is useless movement in space, a movement of false liberty; while in contrast, flight is affirmed when it is a stationary flight, a flight of intensity, or a way out. The change, the becoming of John Arscott illustrates this concept.
Arscott, who planned his "renegade escapade" with other prisoners in vain, is seen "in chains," "bent over, facing away" at the very beginning of Act Two. He is afflicted by the impossibility of escaping this Australian penal colony which is a "foreign upside-down desert." Tortured with perceptions of barrenness, entrapment, and disorientation, Arscott keeps yelling: "There's no escape!" "There's no escape I tell you!"
The process of becoming minor and the trajectory of flight can be identified in the monologue uttered by Arscott in Act II, scene 7, who is playing Sergeant Kite. Arscott seems to draw on the stationary flight in the convict theatre more than on the useless fleeing in geographical space: "I don't want to play myself. When I say Kite's lines I forget everything else. ... I don't have to think about what happened to Kable, I don't have to remember the things I've done, when I speak Kite's lines I don't hate any more. I'm Kite. I'm in Shrewsbury."
The true sense of becoming minor, of an immanent process of desire, and of a continuum of contiguities has to be postponed to be realized until the last scene of the whole play, "Backstage." Backstage, we can sense the change/becoming of Arscott as well as the assemblage of the minor consciousness.
"Tomorrow": The Continuum of Desires
The backstage scene presents a collaborative enterprise of a new "haecceity," and a new becoming. Sideway declares: "I'm going to start a theatre company. Who wants to be in it?" Wisehammer responds: "I will write you a play about justice." Sideway responds: "Only comedies, my boy, only comedies." Wisehammer then offers: "What about a comedy about unrequited love?"
"Tomorrow" carries with it a sense of prolongable, contiguous continuum of desires and possibilities: individual ambition, cruelly suppressed in England, will blossom in the new colony, the new minor theatre. Sideway says: "I'll hold auditions tomorrow." Dabby, Duckling, Mary, and Liz all echo: "Tomorrow."
Wertenbaker's convict theatre never refers to a real theatrical performance, but corresponds to new zones of movements, vibrations, and thresholds in the deserted penal colony. By means of the particular underground tunnel in the rhizome and the burrow space of the convict theatre, the future Australian Sideway Theatre Company is seen burgeoning to displace all the transcendental and the major with the celebration of the continuum of desires.
Black Caesar's Recruitment
When Black Caesar's drunkenness, his stage fright, and his fear of displeasing his Madagascar ancestors threatens to ruin the forthcoming performance, Ralph tries to coerce him into performing by reminding that "our ancestors are thousands of miles away," and Mary encourages Caesar to "[think] of us as your family." In this "we," this universal, intimate collectivity, Wertenbaker displays not only the assemblage of the dislocated outcast/outsiders, but also the functioning of this assemblage.
In the last moments of the play, Arscott successfully recruits Black Caesar to go up on stage with him, when "to the triumphant music of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the sound of applause and laughter from the First Fleet audience, the first Australian performance of The Recruiting Officer begins."
The end of the play shall not be interpreted as the successful pacification of an underclass by the ruling class of New South Wales. In fact, the play ends with a beginning. By means of an indefinite and open production of dramatic and performance text in the future, a process in perpetual motion, which is less a completed burrow than a ceaseless burrowing, is thus rendered possible.
CONCLUSION: THE ENDURING RELEVANCE OF THE PLAY
Our Country's Good remains one of Timberlake Wertenbaker's most powerful and enduring works. It captures the intersection of theatre, punishment, and empire in a way that speaks to both its historical setting and its contemporary context.
The play's central argument is that theatre can be a redemptive force, transforming individuals and communities through the collective act of creation. This argument is made through the transformation of the convicts in the play, who discover dignity, self-respect, and hope through their participation in the theatrical production.
However, the play is not a simple celebration of theatre's power. It also acknowledges the limitations of theatre, its complicity with colonial power, and the ongoing suffering of those who are excluded from its benefits. The Aborigine's presence throughout the play serves as a reminder of the violence and destruction that accompanied the colonial project.
The play's complex treatment of these issues makes it a rich subject for study. It rewards careful attention to structure, character, and theme, and it offers multiple entry points for analysis. Whether approached through the lens of postcolonial theory, Foucault's analysis of punishment, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor literature, or the context of Thatcher's Britain, the play offers a wealth of material for interpretation.
Wertenbaker's play is ultimately a testament to the power of theatre to question, to transform, and to imagine alternatives. It demonstrates that theatre is not merely entertainment but a vital public space in which the most pressing questions of justice, identity, and human dignity can be explored.
As Stafford-Clark remarked, the parallels between the situation the convicts were in and our own society do not have to be looked for; we stumble across them every moment. In an age of mass incarceration, austerity, and cultural cuts, Wertenbaker's play speaks to us with renewed urgency. The "beautiful ones" may not yet be born, but the theatre remains a space in which we can imagine them.
