OUR COUNTRY'S GOOD. To 18 November.

Colchester

OUR COUNTRY’S GOOD
by Timberlake Wertenbaker

Mercury Theatre To 18 November 2006
Runs 2hr 40min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 18 November

Lustrous, sensuous production aptly celebrating ensemble theatre in Colchester.
Dee Evans’ Mercury Theatre has a wide reputation for its ensemble company and bold repertory. Less celebrated is how much of its finest work has been directed by Sue Lefton. This revival of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker (itself based on diaries by Ralph Clark, an 18th-century British army officer in convict Australia) shows Lefton’s origins as a movement expert: officers and female prisoners copulating as Ralph’s expresses his desperate love, a chorus of slow-moving fantasy figures.

But she’s also sensitive to playwrights’ words. And this production responds to the Mercury’s extensive acting space, as Max Stafford-Clark’s 1988 premiere did to the tighter Royal Court stage, where it played with George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, the play these convicts rehearse in an enlightened plan to civilise criminals.

Though the opening scene creates a tight convict-ship’s hold with horizontally-placed ladders, beams radiate, suggesting a wider ship-shape in Tony Simpson’s lighting (beautifully sculptured throughout). And Duckling reveals the affection under her harshness when her officer-lover’s ill by gradually moving across the vast-seeming distance to his body.

Lefton creates a feverish world of pressurised temperaments, notably in Roger Delves-Broughton’s officer-characters and Ignatius Anthony’s Governor, slumped in his chair as he clings to links with classical humanism.

Something like a city, it’s said, is emerging from the convicts’ labour. Similarly, Ralph’s rehearsals with his ragged cast slowly develop from an anthology of interruptions to take shape, infusing the prisoners’ lives. New-found expressiveness is encapsulated as Tony Casement’s Sidaway leaps in with Farquhar-like linguistic elegance to head-off army brutality threatening a fellow cast-member.

Occasional limits of vocal technique are outweighed by Mercury regulars who’ve never been better: Justin Grattan’s harassed yet assertive Ralph, Miranda Floy’s sharp Duckling; while the ever-wonderful Christine Absalom is an eager, darting Dabby Bryant.

Wertenbaker celebrates theatre while demonstrating the struggle between writer and director: Anthony’s convict-author Wisehammer carefully stores away his rejected Prologue. And Stafford-Clark’s final focus on Ralph and Mary Brennan becomes the ensemble’s glory here, the convict-actors’ triumph swiftly free-wheeling from imagined stage audience to Mercury theatregoers, their curtain-call all-too-fleeting after this magnificent production.

Captain Arthur Phillip/Wisehammer: Ignatius Anthony
Major Robbie Ross/Ketch: Tim Treslove
Captain David Collins/Black Caesar/An Aboriginal Australian: Neil D’Souza
Captain Watkin Tench/Sideway: Tony Casement
Captain Jemmy Campbell/Harry Brewer/Arscott: Roger Delves-Broughton
Lieutenant Ralph Clark: Justin Grattan
Mary Brennan/Lieutenant William Faddy: Yvonne Wandera
Dabby Bryant/Meg Long/Rev Johnson: Christine Absalom
Liz Morden/Lieutenant George Johnston: Lizzie Hopley
Duckling Smith/Lieutenant Will Dawes: Miranda Floy

Director: Sue Lefton
Lighting: Tony Simpson
Sound: Marcus Christensen
Fight director: Richard Ryan

2006-11-21 10:49:17