According to the critic and historian Robert Hughes, the first play ever performed in Australia was an amateur production of George Farquhar’s late-Restoration comedy “The Recruiting Officer,” which was staged by a group of convicts in Botany Bay in 1789—a fact upon which the Australian writer Thomas Keneally based his novel “The Playmaker.” Little is apparently known about the production except for a prologue that was for many years thought to have been written by one of the convicts:
From distant climes o’er wide-spread seas we come,
Thought not with much éclat or beat of drum,
True patriots all; for be it understood,
We left our country for our country’s good….
It is from this prologue that Timberlake Wertenbaker took her title for the play she based on Keneally’s novel.
The production of “Our Country’s Good” that the Broadway Alliance is presenting at the Nederlander Theater hails from the Hartford Stage Company. That it proves a sad disappointment is due partly to truly terrible acting across the board—from a cast led by Peter Frechette—and partly to the general lameness of the play. The writing is artsy-dirty, with characters waxing alternately pseudo-lyrical about sex and pseudo-crude about their bodily functions, and spitting and scratching their crotches a lot—all in the service of establishing the play’s status as Serious Theater. But when it comes to ideas, “Our Country’s Good” falls surprisingly short; in fact, it never gets much beyond the initial irony of society’s outcasts performing a play written for and about high society.
It’s hard to imagine someone not being able to make more of this material. After all, it’s not as if “The Recruiting Officer” were one of your stylized snuff-and-scandal comedies of manners. On its own terms, it has political content, which is one reason it appealed to Brecht, who adapted the play under the title “Trumpets and Drums” in 1956, bringing it forward in time to the period of the American Revolution. Wertenbaker’s play seems unaware of any of this: unaware of Brecht, unaware of anything else going on in the world at that time (such as the French Revolution), and—strangest of all—unaware of the bizarreness inherent in the idea of a production of this particular play in a vast, half-settled nation that consisted solely of convicts and soldiers.
Actually, “Our Country’s Good” was written to be performed in repertory with “The Recruiting Officer” itself, at London’s Royal Court Theatre. In London, where it was staged by Max Stafford-Clark, who virtually invented the kind of quick-change role-doubling the play requires, “Our Country’s Good” probably had some resonance—particularly if it was performed with the blend of subtlety and belligerence which has made the Royal Court famous. Presumably, the key to the whole thing was versatility (with actors who played convict-actors in the Wertenbaker taking on corresponding roles in the Farquhar), the idea being to put spin on certain stock figures. At the Nederlander, the play is mute. Mark Lamos has assembled a cast that can at best evoke this or that stereotype (the upper-class Englishman, the Cockney) but in most cases—such as that of an actor who keeps roaring ineptly and erratically in various Celtic strains—doesn’t even manage that much. It’s not clear whether Mr. Lamos’s direction or the size of the theater is primarily at fault here, but neither seems to have helped.
In a way, it’s a pity that “Our Country’s Good” is being produced by the Broadway Alliance, whose mission, wonderful in concept, is to woo back to Broadway an audience of intelligence theater-goers. Nothing insults intelligent people so much as the kind of bogus high-culture event “Our Country’s Good” turns out to be.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, May 20, 1991