It’s always a difficult decision for an artistic director as to how long he or she should wait before staging a play that has been recently produced elsewhere. There are any number of Shakespearean productions, and I can’t think that anyone has complained that the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet is following too closely on the footsteps of the Michael Sheen and Rory Kinnear versions. However, in the case of the National’s new production of Our Country’s Good, it is following sharp on the heels of a new version directed by the play’s original director, Max Stafford-Clark, which achieved a good deal of critical acclaim. It’s easy to see why the NT’s artistic director Rufus Norris wished this to take place in his first season; it’s a properly box-tickingly liberal piece about the redemptive power of theatre in extremis. However, this disappointing new staging by Nadia Fall fails to improve on Stafford-Clark’s revival, making for a tedious evening at the theatre.
Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play, based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, deals with a group of 18th century convicts and officers in Australia. Arriving at Botany Bay after an eight-month journey, they find themselves adrift in a strange new world, beset by uncertainty and doubt. It falls to Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark (Jason Hughes) to attempt to instil civilisation into the prisoners by proposing that they stage a production of Farquhar’s Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer. Even as his cast of felons prove the most reluctant of actors, and his fellow officers offer varying shades of encouragement and criticism, Clark comes to believe that the redemptive power of the theatre is what will save all of them.
Wertenbaker’s play is undoubtedly well-intentioned, and done well can produce several scenes of spine-tingling dramatic power. Here, despite an impressive use of the Olivier theatre’s full capabilities, it feels dragged-out and overblown. It’s a pity that the cast doesn’t double up as felons and officers – as is normally done – but there is the sense throughout that this has been put on as a obligation to fill a couple of months rather than out of genuine desire. (Apart from anything else, it seems peculiar that another Farquhar play – The Beaux Stratagem – has been staged at the National earlier this year, rather than allowing the two contrasting plays to work in rep together.) Cerys Matthews’s songs, while rather lovely in isolation, don’t do a huge amount to drive the action, neither offering Brechtian distance nor an insight into the characters.
The performances are mostly fine, with Hughes’s intense, decent protagonist and Lee Ross’s amusingly deluded would-be actor Robert Sideway the pick of the bunch, and Peter McKintosh’s design has a suitably epic quality. Yet what can’t be overcome is a sense of ‘why?’ Anyone who saw the most recent staging doesn’t need to bother with this, while others are liable to be disappointed by what ends up being a very mediocre evening. In what has been a strong opening season for Norris, it’s a pity that this uninspired piece of programming wasn’t dropped for something more challenging.
Our Country’s Good at the National Theatre until 17th October 2015. For more information and tickets visit the website.
