The award-winning playwright has revisited her seminal play Our Country’s Good and rewritten elements for audiences today. She talks to Tom Wicker about her reasons for doing so, why she thinks writers are no longer given the right to fail and the vital importance of engaging children with theatre
If you have studied A-level English or drama in the past few decades, there’s a good chance that you’ll have encountered Our Country’s Good. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s seminal critique of justice, crime and punishment has been a syllabus staple since its 1988 debut at London’s Royal Court Theatre.
Adapted from Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, it follows a group of Royal Marines and convicts in a 1780s Australian penal colony who stage Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer. It is one of many achievements of the UK-based playwright, who, since bursting on to the scene in the early 1980s, has become one of British theatre’s most influential writers. Our Country’s Good is just one of more than 30 plays she’s written. She dominated the 1980s and 1990s with her politically inflected writing. She won a hat-trick of awards – a 1991 Critics’ Circle Theatre award, the 1992 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and a 1991 Writers’ Guild award – for Three Birds Alighting on a Field, which premiered at the Royal Court before transferring to the West End and later to New York. The Guild also recognised Jefferson’s Garden as 2016’s best new play….