No easy route to our country's good

First appeared: Evening Star, Ipswich, November 4,2006

Our Country's Good, by Timberlake Wertenbaker
Mercury Theatre, Colchester until November 18

IN June 1789, just 16 months after the first shipload of transported criminals landed in Botany Bay , a cast of convicts staged a play there.

No reviews record how good their performance of George Farquhar's comedy The Recruiting Officer was.

Our Country's Good follows that unlikely drama from its inception, through rehearsals, to the first night. And I can report that both the play (based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker) and this production are not just good, but stunning.

From the opening whipcrack of a flogging in the transport ship's hold, we are gripped in a riveting piece of theatre.

As we have come to expect of the Mercury Company, the acting and direction is of the highest standard. It is well-drilled ensemble playing without a flaw.

All but one of the ten-strong cast play at least two characters each, but that is a strength not a weakness.

Tim Treslove, for example, is the martinet Major Ross, a sarcastic bully who revels in the brutality he is given power to inflict.

But he is also the unfortunate Ketch Freeman, a convict who is made the unwilling hangman of his comrades.

The two roles counterpoint each other uncomfortably, and Treslove is utterly convincing in both.

Ignatius Anthony plays the governor of the penal colony as a far-sighted man, both well-intentioned and world-weary. The same qualities, with none of the authority, mark his convict character, the bookish Wisehammer.

Roger Delves-Broughton does hard-edged comedy as Captain Campbell, soft-centred tragedy as Harry Brewer.

Miranda Floy captures the essence of a downtrodden whore looking for salvation in her relationship with an officer. Her exquisitely played reaction to Harry's death is spine-tingling.

Her counterpoint is Yvonne Wandera, who is superb as Mary, the relatively unsullied convict who gets both the leading role in the play and ultimately its director.

Tony Casement camps it up outrageously, and hilariously, as the stage-obsessed Sideway. While he portrays the unreality of theatre, Justin Grattan as the play's put-upon director Lieutenant Clark embodies its hopefulness.

Both funny and sad, grim and life-affirming, Our Country's Good is thought-provoking high entertainment. It takes no easy routes and offers no easy answers.

If there is one slight disappointment it is that the Mercury did not think to stage their own production of The Recruiting Officer to run alongside it. That would no doubt have been very good too.