Our Country's Good (Modern Plays)

Wertenbaker has searched history and found in it a humanistic lesson for hard modern times: rough, sombre, undogmatic and warm. * Sunday Times * Rarely has the redemptive, transcendental power of theatre been argued with such eloquence and passion * Independent * Highly theatrical, often funny and at times dark and disturbing, it sets an infant civilization on the stage with clarity, economy and insight * Daily Telegraph * infinitely resonant . . . a beautiful play. * Daily Express * Timberlake Wertenbaker's play is a modern classic. . . . a remarkable celebration of theatre's potential to regenerate lost souls. * Evening Standard * Wertenbaker's play . . . shows the regenerative power of drama . . . the heart of Wertenbaker's play lies in its endlessly topical debate about crime and punishment, and in its moving portrait of drama as a means of giving voice, purpose and a sense of communality to a group of social outcasts. . . . a landmark play. * Guardian * Timberlake Wertenbaker's play remains an important piece of work, a love letter to the theatre laced with an anger against those who try to curb its transformative powers. . . . a rhetorically pugnacious play. * Daily Telegraph * Wertenbaker's play has become a humanist classic * Observer * an optimistic ode to the redemptive power of theatre * Financial Times * Our Country's Good is at once a vivid portrait of conditions in the new colony . . . and a richly comic repository of 18th century performance styles. Above all, it is a glorious testament to the healing power of art. * Sunday Express * Timberlake Wertenbaker's rich, remarkable 1988 drama about the redemptive power of theatre . . . a play that leaves the audience, like the characters, transported . . . unashamedly idealistic * Mail on Sunday *

Observed by a lone, mystified Aboriginal Australian, the first convict ship arrives in Botany Bay, 1788, crammed with England's outcasts. Colony discipline in this vast and alien land is brutal. Three proposed public hangings incite an argument: how best to keep the criminals in line, the noose or a more civilised form of entertainment?

The ambitious Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark steps forward with a play. But as the mostly illiterate cast rehearses, and a sense of common purpose begins to take hold, the young officer's own transformation is as marked and poignant as that of his prisoners.

A profoundly humane piece of theatre, steeped in suffering yet charged with hope, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good (based on a true story) celebrates the redemptive power of art.

It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1988, winning the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award. This edition was published to coincide with a major revival production at the National Theatre, which opened on 19 August 2015.