Director Sue Lefton

Loved as a modern classic, Our Country’s Good ells of unlikely friendship, power and the struggle to survive. 1789: a young lieutenant sets out to direct a cast of convicts in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, the first English play on Australian soil. But conditions are hardly conducive to the production of a comedy: the brutalised and subjugated convicts contend with a lack of scripts, cruel and disapproving officers and a leading lady who may be heading for the gallows. The prisoners find themselves snared between opposing views for improving human behaviour: education or punishment. Amid this squalor, comedy seems as remote a possibility as successfully sowing the seeds of love and hope. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s breathtaking, haunting drama won the 1988 Laurence Olivier Play of the Year and is a superb vehicle for the Mercury Theatre Company actors.