Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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by Timberlake Wertenbaker, directed by Max Stafford-Clark
Out of Joint and Octagon Theatre Bolton, Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto
September 17-October 26, 2014
Lt. Clark: “Theatre is like a small republic; it requires private sacrifices for the good of the whole”
In the 25 years since it first premiered, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good has gone from being a radical new play to a standard teaching text in Britain. In 2012 The Octagon Theatre in Bolton and Out of Joint combined to present a 25th anniversary production of the play. The production helmed by Max Stafford-Clark, the play’s original director at the Royal Court Theatre, won rave reviews in London and comes to Toronto as part of its tour.
The last professional production Toronto saw was a fine one by the then-new theatre company Theatrefront in 2001. Those with longer memories may have seen the play in 1989 when the Royal Court Theatre took the original production on tour with George Farquhar’s 1706 comedy The Recruiting Officer, the play at the centre of Our Country’s Good. Overall, Stafford-Clark’s new production lacks the energy and tension that made his earlier production so gripping. Nevertheless, the new production vigorously confirms the play’s status as a modern classic.
The play is based in part on Thomas Keneally’s 1987 historical novel The Playmaker concerning the story behind the first-ever performance of a play in the penal colony of Australia when in 1789 a group of enlightened British officers allowed a cast of convicts to present Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer. The goal of this social experiment, conceived of by Lt. Ralph Clark and sanctioned by the presiding governor of New South Wales, but bitterly opposed by many, is to open the eyes of the convicts to a more refined way of life and self-expression through their acting of Farquhar’s idealized characters and their elegant mode of speech.
This true story is fascinating in itself, but Wertenbaker expands the meaning of this incident to become a celebration of the transformational power of the theatre both for the actors and the audience. Theatre can overcome determinist views of character and class by displaying the multiple possibilities of character within each person and revealing social behaviour as itself a form of acting. The play avoids the sentimentality of this optimistic notion by simultaneously showing how ingrained the opposition to it is and how hard won the victory of Clark and his abused cast of convicts.
The very structure Wertenbaker gives the play reinforces its theme about the transformation in that ten of the eleven actors play at least two very distinct roles. Wertenbaker does this to show that imagination is the primary weapon against type-casting. Thus, Cornelius Macarthy, who plays both an Australian aborigine and an ex-slave from Madagascar, is also cast as Captain Watkin Tench, who does not believe that convicts can be reformed. Similarly, three of the four women playing prisoners are also cast in one scene as male officers and one of the male actors (Sam Graham) plays an officer and a midshipman plus two different convicts, one male and one female. Indeed, the Farquhar play they are rehearsing involves a woman who disguises herself as a man to be near the man she loves. When the subject is broached in the play whether the audience will find this doubling in Farquhar confusing, Clark answers that the audience will not as long as they pay attention and “People who cannot pay attention should not go to the theatre”.
Fortunately, the cast does a superb job of keeping their double, triple or quadruple roles clear and distinct. While this is an ensemble work, there are a number of notably fine performances. Simon Darwen is impressive in both his roles – as Captain Arthur Phillip, the literate, enlightened Governor of the colony who believes in the Enlightenment notion that nurture can bring out the inherent good in man’s nature and as the Jewish convict John Wisehammer, a man in love with words who writes a new prologue for Farquhar’s play. Richard Neale distinguishes his two roles so well you would not think the same person played both. His accent and demeanour as the brutal Scot, Major Robbie Ross, who regards the prisoners as little more than animals, is completely different from those of the convict Ketch Freeman, the meek Irishman, coerced into being a hangman and who is therefore despised by all the prisoners. David Newman’s measured, restrained manner as Judge David Collins contrasts strongly with his comic exuberance as the pickpocket and would-be actor, Robert Sideway, a character based on the real Robert Sidaway [sic] (1758-1809) who would go on, as his character hopes, to open the first-ever theatre in Sydney.
Among the women, Victoria Gee is a delight in her primary role as the convict Dabby Bryant, who has managed to come through the ordeal of transportation with her native wit and enthusiasm for life intact. Anna Tierney brings out all the complexity of her primary role as Duckling Smith, a convict in love with a midshipman but oppressed by his jealousy.
The main difference between Stafford-Clark’s present production and his original is that he has not encouraged as thoroughly detailed performances from actors in principal roles as he had done earlier. Several characters undergo a profound change during the course of the action, but Stafford-Clark only highlights the beginning and end points of their emotional journeys rather than emphasizing the gradations of change in between. One example is Jessica Tomchak in her main role as the convict Mary Brenham, who moves from extreme shyness to a self-confidence she has learned from playing the character Sylvia in Farquhar’s play. Tomchak is excellent in acting both extremes of Mary’s character but we’d like to notice where the breakthrough occurs for her.
The same is true of Kathryn O’Reilly in her main role as Liz Morden, the convict least likely to be redeemed in the colony. O’Reilly gives her a barely suppressed rage that can break out at any moment, yet suggests some undetermined interior trouble akin to mental illness. She maintains this disturbed state with such strength that when she breaks her criminals’ code of silence in Act 2, it seems to come from nowhere as does her subsequent statement of humility as an actress.
Sam Graham does distinguish his four roles, but is much better as the nearly inarticulate Captain Campbell and the enthusiastic convict John Arscott than he is in his main role of Harry Brewer. Former hangman, Midshipman Brewer is frustrated by the silence he receives from his beloved Duckling Smith and is driven to madness by the ghosts of those he had hanged. While his scenes with Duckling are well played, Graham is unconvincing in conveying Brewer’s nightly terrors.
The only actor assigned only one role is Nathan Ives-Moiba as Lt. Ralph Clark, who formulates the idea of presenting a play, becomes its director and eventually must act in it as Silvia’s beloved Captain Plume. Ives-Moiba is excellent at showing Clark’s ludicrously sentimental worship of the girl he left in England, but we don’t see the steps that lead him to fall in love with his leading lady, Mary Brenham, and long for the physical love he had previously considered base.
A major plus in Stafford-Clark’s new production is Tim Shortall’s design. He is fully aware that this is a play about the theatre and so has created a stage-upon-the-stage where all the action takes place. Hanging canvasses serve as the sails of a ship, backdrops for scenes and the curtains for the play-within-a-play. Scene changes occur in half-light, not blackouts, and so do many costume changes. Andy Smith’s soundscape of Australia’s wild world of birdsong is extremely effective in underscoring the strangeness of a land new to Europeans.
If Stafford-Clark does not excel as he did before in delineating all the nuances of the principal characters, he does succeed more forcefully this time in showing how both the convicts and the officers sent to guard them feel they have been exiled from the mother country. Major Ross, the angriest of the officers, states explicitly that he thinks the officers’ assignment to Australia is Britain’s way of punishing them for losing the American War of Independence. Ross’s response to exile is to lash out at others and retreat into bigotry. The more enlightened officers like Phillip, Collins and Clark realize that their exile with the convicts means that they have to help the convicts construct a new, possibly better society than the one they left.
Our Country’s Good is a play as thought-provoking and emotionally elevating now as it was 25 years ago. Even if his emphases have altered, the chance to see a great play directed again by its original director is one that no theatre-lover should miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Cast members of Our Country’s Good; Nathan Ives-Moiba as Lt. Clark and Jessica Tomchak as Mary Brenham. ©2014 Out of Joint/Octagon Theatre Bolton.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2014-09-18
Our Country’s Good