Day 63: Our Country's Good, by Timberlake Wertenbaker

This is a play I've seen performed once, by a mostly well-off, almost exclusively white extra-curricular drama group at my university (a group I was a member of for much of my time there, but I wasn't in this particular play) who probably had not a single experience between them of anything more criminal than downloading a song or two. In the front of the book there is a preface which explains that the author took his premiere cast to see a play in the prison at Wormwood Scrubs as part of the rehearsal process. This is followed by a handful of letters from inmates who were in that production who subsequently read Our Country's Good and were talking about the accuracy of it, and plans to try to put it on themselves. I can only imagine how that would go, but I expect it would be a rather powerful and harrowing experience.

When I read the synopsis to a friend, their first comment was "so it's a black comedy then?". Well, no. There are bits that are funny, but it's not a farce. There are just people. Officers who are fallible, some even have a shady history which makes them liable to be stern in order to hide that past, but perhaps also allows them the streak of humanity that might save a life somewhere along the line. There's the thread of a question which never really gets answered satisfactorily through the play, whether an evil or criminal personality is endemic from birth. The play within a play, in this case, is turned on its head as a device. Instead of showing up the evils and failings of those in power, it brings out the humanity and pride in a group of people so broken and forsaken that they truly believe, "we left our country for our country's good".

There's not a lot of happy endings in this play. There are on-stage deaths, and more described offstage. There are love affairs and propositions but these involve women who have only really known sex in the context of prostitution and rape, which makes it all the more devastating when possibly the most tragically used (and used to it) woman in the entire colony loses the man she could never tell she loved for fear he'd stop sleeping with her. Those responsible for hangings are haunted by the ghosts of the dead. Through it all there's the background concern that the next supply ship is overdue, leaving the officers with their own sense of lonliness and abandonment. There are layers and layers of stripped-down humanity, and it is the combination of an isolated community, desperate and dangerous people and the mirror that is theatre that really lets us see all of it. It's one thing to get to grips with those layers as an actor and perform it as you might any other play, but I find myself just a little bit curious to see how much deeper it might go when performed by a company with the personal experiences to inform the life of the characters.