Our Country’s Good
St James Theatre 18th February 2013
Age is a slippery thing. Until the age of thirty it is true to say that you are always the youngest person in the room. But once past that milestone age your perception is jolted regularly by strange occurrences: You celebrate a humdrum birthday and someone asks you if it’s the big 4-0 and you laugh so hard that it takes you a while to realise that they were being serious; school boys call you a milf even when you ARE NOT WITH YOUR CHILDREN, when by rights, you should really just be an ilf, you know! And cultural points of reference that you thought were universal turn out to be specific to the particular time when you grew up; it is, for example, possible to get through adolescence without having seen ‘Pulp Fiction’ nowadays.
Following on from this, you read one day that a play that you studied for GCSE is being described by a broadsheet newspaper as a ‘forgotten work’ that is ‘enjoying a revival’. Well, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s ‘Our Country’s Good’ has not been forgotten by this English student. And so it was that my sister and I hurried along the dark pavement with a little maternal trot towards the St James theatre to see Max Stafford-Clark’s revival of said play. It seems that trotting must now be avoided as I smashed the iphone en route; trotting and texting can now be consigned to the list of ‘things I used to be able to do at the same time.’ I should mention that my sister had never heard of the play on account of being younger than me but then Stafford-Clark claims that ‘Our Country’s Good’ is a play which “a whole generation has grown up without seeing”.
The theatre fell into disrepair in the ‘90s and then, with the help of various grants, was virtually rebuilt to create a cosy, sophisticated establishment, the bar of which looked very appealing, if only we hadn’t been late, as usual. We had to get to our seats (right at the front) by crossing the stage. The St James would generously be described as intimate but with the stage jutting into our knees, the impression was more cramped. Still, we were right at the front which is a treat. Everything in London is expensive, except the theatre when compared with the RST. You need to take out a small mortgage to sit that near the front in Stratford, restricted leg room or not.
The cast arranged themselves on a makeshift ship bound for New South Wales and spoke their eerie, poetic opening lines and at the words ‘cunt’ and ‘lick’ I was suddenly fifteen again and trying to look very serious so as not to giggle. The female convicts all looked like they had taken method acting too far and had starved themselves for the part; it was suitably grim.
However, what unfolded made for an exhilarating and entertaining evening. To denote the scenes that took place in daylight the full force of the theatre’s dazzling lights shone onto the stage, giving the impression of a searing Australian heat. In contrast, the night-time scenes, especially when Ralph Clark, played by the fresh-faced Dominic Thorburn, is writing to his beloved wife Betsy back home on her English pedestal, seem ghostly and lonely. These scenes show us how far from home all the characters are, convicts and officers alike.
The play’s humour was brought out by superb acting. Matthew Needham as Robert Sideway was endearing in his earnest attempts at theatrical portrayal of emotion whilst rehearsing George Farquhar’s ‘The Recruiting Officer’; as he tells Ralph Clark, the officer turned director, ‘I’m still establishing my melancholy.’ This received riotous applause from the audience. Of course, juxtaposed with the humour were scenes of such startling poignancy that it was almost painful and the scenes are short so this layering was happening rapidly without allowing any one mood to prevail. As each convict told a brief account of their life-stories a tale of injustice emerged in a way that was not self-conscious or didactic, just touching.
The cast, like the venue, was small and most actors played two parts, an officer and a convict. For obvious reasons this was tremendously effective but if it’s not obvious I should explain that it portrayed something of what it’s like to walk in another man’s shoes or, there but for the grace of God go I..... or some such proverb. Most successful of all was Ciaran Owens who played the repellent bigot Major Robbie Ross and the desperate and shamed hangman Ketch Freeman. He was equally believable as Ross, whom he played as a Scottish sadist who used his power to torture, both physically and emotionally, the convicts. And as Ketch, he was a soft headed and hearted Irishman, led into criminal ways by lack of judgement and tormented by the voices of the dead that he’s hanged. The scene where he measures his friend, Liz Morden, for her hanging is tender to watch as he promises that it will be quick and she will feel nothing and he picks her up to ascertain her weight.
Of course, the play enjoys this revival now because the Arts are undergoing so many cuts but it seems a shame, almost cowardly, to make the play a symbol of our political climate. ‘Our Country’s Good’ seems to transcend the political; it is a play with a simple morality that avoids sentimentality or blatancy by its dystopian and far removed setting of a 1780’s penal colony. But pick the play up and place it in any setting where people doubt the possibility of redemption and it is just as effective; whether a society is suffering a recession or enjoying a boom.
