GEORGE Barrington’s famous words: “True patriots all, for be it understood, We left our country for our country’s good” were spoken at the opening of a new theatre in Sydney in 1796, but that wasn’t the first theatre opening in the fledgling colony.

That honour goes to a king’s birthday production with a convict cast, of George Farquhar’s comedy “The Recruiting Officer”, staged as part of Capt Arthur Phillip’s “progressive” push to civilise the rabble.

Now Canberra Rep is staging “Our Country’s Good”, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play-within-a-play-within-a-play on the same subject, with Karen Vickery at the helm. 

It was the long-time director of the Royal Court Theatre in London, Max Stafford-Clark, who spotted the theatrical potential of the story, told eloquently by Thomas Keneally in his novel “The Playmaker”.

To link “The Recruiting Officer” with the notion of convicts leaving the old country for their country’s good seems like a great place to start, so he set up workshops and commissioned Wertenbaker to do an imaginary reconstruction of a performance of Farquhar’s play and see where it went.

The end result was a play with 22 characters and snippets of Farquhar’s ridiculous comedy, looking at how the play came to be performed in the first place. 

But it is, Vickery emphasises, very much a contemporary play that speaks about the power of theatre to redeem and reform.

In the earliest years, Vickery reports, there were only two play scripts to be found in the colony and of them, the very funny “The Recruiting Officer” was a shoo-in compared to the sober alternative, “The Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey” by Nicholas Rowe.

“Our Country’s Good” was written in England where the fascination with convict Australia still reigns supreme, so although Wertenbaker’s play is undoubtedly brilliant, it’s not done very often, Vickery says, because its lens is focused on the colonisers and it doesn’t deal with Australia’s first inhabitants, despite the inclusion in the cast of a stereotyped character simply called “The Aborigine”, played in London by a British person of colour. 

“You can’t do that now,” Vickery says. She cut him out.

Because many of the characters played by her formidable cast are based on real people, she reports, some of them have been tracing their characters’ histories, while others have been reading Robert Hughes’ “The Fatal Shore” or novels set in the period or the books by First Fleet officer Watkin Tench.

The general reaction of the cast has been to say: “Oh, my god, these people were real”, but Vickery admits that many of the characters are either inventions or a merging of characters.

The historical people onstage include Capt Arthur Phillip; Capt David Collins, who became judge-advocate; Lieut Ralph Clark, who staged the play and First Fleet convict Robert Sidaway, who went on to build the very theatre in Sydney where Barrington’s famous prologue was proclaimed. 

Another character who, Vickery believes, is “real” is the loquacious convict Dabbie Bryant, who escaped the colony by boat, made it back to Devon and was eventually given a medal by the king for her hair-raising adventures.

Even though it was written in the ’80s, the play feels very contemporary, Vickery says. 

“It’s very short, sharp and well-constructed, with a multi-layered gallery of characters who are so vivid.

“There’s a lot of humour in it, which is a good thing because in real life there was real blackness about the treatment of convicts,” she says.

During rehearsals, they did a reading from George Farquhar’s play, a load of fun because it’s a satire that sends up the contrast between recruiting for war and recruiting for marriage.

So how is this production a play-within-a-play-within-a play? 

That’s because Vickery’s staging as the Rep company putting on “Our Country’s Good” and within that, “The Recruiting Officer”, but you’ll just have to be there to see how that works.

“Our Country’s Good,” Canberra Rep Theatre, September 8-24. 

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