Our Country's Good

Timberlake Wertenbaker was Resident Writer for Shared Experience in 1983 and the Royal Court Theatre 1984-85. She is best known for her play Our Country's Good (1988). Other plays include The Love of the Nightingale (1989), Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1992), The Line (2009) and Jefferson's Garden (2015) for which she won the Writers' Guild Award for Best Play 2016.Sophie Bush is a Lecturer in Performance at Sheffield Hallam University and has previously taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Huddersfield and Manchester Metropolitan. Her doctorate, on the work of Timberlake Wertenbaker, was awarded by the University of Sheffield in 2011, and in September 2013, her first book, The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker, was published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

• CommentaryChronology: ­ A timeline of Wertenbaker’s life and works, set alongside key theatrical, social and political events of the period.Contexts:- The 1780s: Attitudes to Crime and Punishment; The First Fleet and the Penal Colony of New South Wales; Theatrical Styles and Conventions; The Recruiting Officer- The 1980s: Attitudes to Crime and Punishment; Theatre Funding; The Royal Court, Max Stafford-Clark and the ‘Joint Stock Method’; The Playmaker- Timberlake WertenbakerThemes: - Guilt and Innocence; Punishment, Rehabilitation and Redemption; The Value of Theatre; Language, Silence and Voice; ColonialismDramatic Devices: - Language(s): Regional Dialects; Articulacy and Inarticulacy; The Aborigine- Episodic Structure- Theatrical Style: Multi-roling and Cross-casting; Brechtian Aesthetic- Options for DesignProduction History- A TimelineCritical Reception- Critical response, recognition and influence- The Play TodayAcademic Debate:­ A brief discussion of academic responses to the playFurther Study: A bibliography of texts for further study - A discussion of Comparative Literature (by Wertenbaker and others)PLAY TEXT - OUR COUNTRY'S GOOD

Wertenbaker has searched history and found in it a humanistic lesson for hard modern times: rough, sombre, undogmatic and warm