Australia 1789. A young married lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country. With only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts, and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal...Winner of the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award in 1988, and many other major awards, Our Country's Good premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1988 and opened on Broadway in 1991. 'Rarely has the redemptive, transcendental power of theatre been argued with such eloquence and passion.' Georgina Brown, Independent Methuen Student Editions are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. As well as the complete text of the play itself, the volume contains a chronology of the playwright's life and work; an introduction giving the background to the play; a discussion of the various interpretations; and notes on individual words and phrases in the text.

Our Country's Good

Wertenbaker, Timberlake

Dramatic

Australia 1789. A young married lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country. With only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts, and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal...Winner of the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award in 1988, and many other major awards, Our Country's Good premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1988 and opened on Broadway in 1991. 'Rarely has the redemptive, transcendental power of theatre been argued with such eloquence and passion.' Georgina Brown, Independent Methuen Student Editions are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. As well as the complete text of the play itself, the volume contains a chronology of the playwright's life and work; an introduction giving the background to the play; a discussion of the various interpretations; and notes on individual words and phrases in the text.

OUR COUNTRY'S GOOD:NE

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Heinemann

Our Country's Good Based on the Novel 'the Playmaker' by Thomas Kenneally

METHUEN

Australia 1789. A young married lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country. With only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts, and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal..."Wertenbaker has searched history and found in it a humanistic lesson for hard modern times: rough, sombre, undogmatic and warm" (Sunday Times); "Highly theatrical, often funny and at times dark and disturbing, it sets an infant civilization on the stage with clarity, economy and insight" (Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph)

Our Country's Good: Based on the Novel "The Playmaker" by Thomas Kennedy

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Methuen Publishing

Tired of confinement to her father's house, Mary Traverse, a young eighteenth-century woman, decides to see more of the world

The Grace of Mary Traverse

Faber&Faber

This play combines elements from Greek mythology and the history and drama of classical Greece. The king of Athens gives his daughter Procne in marriage to the king of Thrace. Her sister Philomele sets out to find her but is seduced by Tereus who silences her by cutting out her tongue.

The Love of the Nightingale and the Grace of Mary Traverse

Art galleries and auction houses often artificially inflate the values of works of art and in doing so, they undermine the appreciation of intrinsic artistry. This is the issue that confronts the central character in this play. The playwright also wrote "Our Country's Good".

Three Birds Alighting on a Field

In The Break of Day Timberlake Wertenbaker turns a sharp and beady eye on three women and their partners. The century is coming to an end and a feeling of dissatisfaction and unease seizes the group. Is it too late to have children? Were they wrong to focus so much on work? These questions force each of them to recast their future.Timberlake Wertenbaker's new play was commissioned by Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint Theatre Company. The play toured in 1995 and opened at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in November.

The Break of Day

A collection of Timberlake Wertenbaker plays which spans her work from 1984 to 1992, including "Our Country's Good", which won the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award in 1988.

Timberlake Wertenbaker Plays: Plays One : New Anatomies, the Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country's Good, the Love of the Nightingale, Three Birds Alighting on a Field (Contemporary Classics)

The scene is set: it's 1831 and the naturalist Charles Darwin is invited to travel with Robert FitzRoy into unchartered waters off the coast of South America aboard The Beagle. So far, so factual. But for Millie, Ian and Tom, getting to grips with a 1998 stage version of events includes uncovering the polarities both in and between their own lives. The exploration of nineteenth-century philosophical tensions, with the staunch solidity of FitzRoy's Christian ideals sparing with Darwin's slowly dawning radical vision, provokes unsuspected emotions in the present-day director and actors. How is it possible to look back and reach within oneself for meaning when belief has been replaced by a void? What place has personal commitment in a haphazard world? Timberlake Wertenbaker's absorbing new play slides a scalpel beneath the surface of emotions and beliefs and looks at how we live with one another in a society conditioned by evolution.

After Darwin

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Books by Wertenbaker, Timberlake