About
Our Country's Good Synopsis
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.
Based on the novel The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally
It is published here in a new Methuen 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.
To support further study of Our Country's Good, you can find resources compiled by Sophie Bush available on the Bloomsbury English and Drama Teacher Resources page.
And join Sophie Bush for a Q&A session as she discusses her own experience of teaching the play, her research into the history, practice and politics of contemporary British Theatre, as well as exploring some practical ways of teaching Our Country’s Good to students at home.
A Preview of Our Country's Good is available here.
Used by multiple exam boards as set texts and comparison texts on Drama and Theatre Studies and English Literature courses.
About This Edition
Press Reviews
Timberlake Wertenbaker Press Reviews
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
'Rarely has the redemptive, transcendental power of theatre been argued with such eloquence and passion.' Georgina Brown, Independent
Author
About Timberlake Wertenbaker
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.
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