OUR COUNTRY'S GOOD Opens At Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

Our Country's Good follows Mike Tweddle's A Midsummer Night's Dream as the second production in the 2019 Factory Company Season at Tobacco Factory Theatres.

Directed by Anna Girvan (Exit the King, National Theatre) the Factory Company will perform a new, in the round production of Wertenbaker's political masterpiece. Packed full of humanity, Our Country's Good is based on the lives of real people who sailed with the First Fleet; a group of convicts and soldiers sent to Australia to set up a new penal colony, which became the first European settlement.

The true story of the first convict colony in Australia, Our Country's Good is fearlessly bold and vibrantly theatrical. It is a powerhouse of a play which questions who gets to set the rules in 'civilised' society and which cleverly redresses ideas about the morality of crime and punishment.

We are talking about criminals, often hardened criminals. They have a habit of vice and crime. Many criminals seem to have been born that way. It is in their nature.

Captain Phillip believes that it is his Officers' duty to rehabilitate convicts rather than continually punish them for their criminal past. He commissions a young and opportunistic Second Lieutenant, Ralph Clark, to stage a theatre production performed by the inmates. Battling ridicule and the threat of hanging, Ralph and the actors discover the lives they could have led if society had cast them in different roles.

Witty and thought-provoking, Wertenbaker's masterpiece questions the meaning of 'civilised' society as we know it and who has the right to determine and shape its future.

Though written in 1988, Our Country's Good is set 250 years ago. Director Anna Girvan's non-traditional staging will avoid all stuffiness and bring out what for her is its central theme: the power of theatre as a tool for change in society.

Reading the text as a teenager, I don't think I quite grasped its humour and pathos and it was only reading it again, having worked with community theatre groups, that I really sparked a passion for the text. I have seen first-hand the power that theatre can have to reform communities and create an outlet for creativity, which so many institutions think of as a luxury rather than a vital part of education. I have seen the transformative effect of giving people a voice and platform to let their story be told Theatre is a means of escape for the trapped convicts in the play and it is going to be interesting exploring the question of 'who or what is theatre for?'

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