Pages

Showing posts with label Harry Kershaw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harry Kershaw. Show all posts

Thursday, 12 September 2024

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

After a few years away from its ubiquity about a decade ago, I'm going to guess Our Country's Good is back on the A'Level syllabus as it makes a return to the stage (and the school groups in the audience seemed very familiar with the play as well.) For Rachel O'Riordan's production at the Lyric Hammersmith Timberlake Wertenbaker has made some revisions to her most famous play, apparently to provide a more authentic voice to the speeches by the play's sole Australian First Nations character, who casts a detached, quizzical eye over the hordes of British men and women who've come off a fleet of ships. In addition to these text revisions, which I guess are the translations into Aboriginal dialect that pepper the speeches, instead of a man in traditional dress Killara (Naarah) is now a woman in modern clothes, witnessing the soldiers and convicts arriving in what will eventually become Sydney in the late 18th century.