Our Country’s Good: Based on the novel ‘The Playmaker’ by Thomas Keneally

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

It is published here in a new Student Edition, alongside commentary and notes by Sophie Bush.

The commentary includes a chronology of the play and the playwright’s life and work as well as discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created.