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.

Theatre review: Jules and Jim

New Artistic Director Stella Powell-Jones makes her Jermyn Street directing debut with an adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché's iconic French novel Jules and Jim, best-known for being adapted into a Truffaut film. It's not the kind of story that would necessarily attract me, but the stage adaptation is by Timberlake Wertenbaker, who doesn't usually steer me wrong. Well I knew it was going to be French, but surely nothing has any business being that French. Taking place in the first few decades of the 20th century, Jules (Samuel Collings) is a German visiting France to improve his French, where he meets Parisian Jim (Alex Mugnaioni,) his instant platonic soulmate. They discuss literature a lot and go on a grand tour to Greece, where they see a recently-excavated statue whose smile they say they would follow to the ends of the earth if it was a real woman.

Theatre review: Britannicus

In a year that's been dominated by stories of swings and understudies keeping the theatre industry going - halfway through and I've probably already seen more people covering roles than in any other year - another show having to cope with cast illness has been the Lyric Hammersmith's take on Jean Racine's Britannicus: Ben and I were meant to see the show last Friday but it got cancelled, and there were further cancellations this week. With the theatre, like so many, not being able to afford to carry regular understudies, it's only by bringing in two actors to cover roles script-in-hand that they've managed to reopen tonight, in time for us to be second time lucky and catch it before it closes next week. And even if not quite at its best I'm glad I managed to see a show I'd been particularly looking forward to - I've seen and enjoyed a past production that used the same Timberlake Wertenbaker translation that Atri Banerjee's production uses.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Whenever I review a Shakespeare play, I make a note in the subject line of the company or venue, as there's so many productions of his plays I think it's best to be clear which one I'm talking about. I almost feel like I should do the same for Our Country's Good, because despite only first seeing it in 2012, this is now my third production. Timberlake Wertenbaker's play is an undisputed modern classic (though not one of the 101 best play ever according to Michael Billington but it's fine - he asked an imaginary woman what she thought and she agreed with him.) Based on true events, it follows one of the first shipments of convicts to be transported to Australia in 1788, to the area that would become Sydney. For the duration of their sentences they will remain prisoners, watched over by the army, but when their time is done they'll be sent out to colonise the new land.

Theatre review: Midsummer Mischief Programme A - The Ant and the Cicada andRevolt. She Said. Revolt again

As a companion piece to the RSC's "Roaring Girls" season, Erica Whyman commissioned a quartet of short plays by female playwrights on the theme of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's quote "Well-behaved women seldom make history." Collectively called Midsummer Mischief, their run in Dame Stratford-upon-Avon is followed by a brief showcase at the Royal Court Upstairs. The one-acters are presented in two double bills, each only getting two performances here, and Programme A was the only one I could fit into my schedule; but it was the one I wanted to see more as the writers were more promising: The double bill opens with Timberlake Wertenbaker and her take on a modern Greek tragedy. Of course, classic Greek tragedy is a specialty of Wertenbaker's, and its themes percolate through The Ant and the Cicada (a reference to the Aesop fable commonly known as The Ant and the Grasshopper.)

Theatre review: Our Ajax

A figure of pure brute force, Ajax isn't one of the best-loved heroes of the Trojan War, better known nowadays for his bathroom scouring abilities. Timberlake Wertenbaker admits in her introduction to the playtext that Sophocles' play about him was hard for her to get to grips with. So her new version Our Ajax takes a different tack to most of her classical translations, more explicitly superimposing a modern story of Afghanistan over the one set in Troy - with only partial success. We first meet Ajax (Joe Dixon) dragging bloody corpses across the stage: When his nemesis Odysseus (Adam Riches) was promoted above him, Ajax snapped and murdered him and all his soldiers. Or so he thinks: In fact the goddess Athena (Gemma Chan) cast a confusion spell over him to protect Odysseus, and he actually slaughtered the allied army's goats and dogs.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good toured last year, but that hasn't put original director Max Stafford-Clark off returning to it with his Out of Joint company to mark its 25th anniversary. The play has become an A'level set text, and accordingly the St James Theatre - where the new production ends a national tour - was fuller than I'm used to seeing it, largely with school parties. From the snippets of conversation I overheard, Our Country's Good inspires a lot of strong feeling in the teenagers who study it, and they seemed completely satisfied by a production that's been cast with a number of actors who aren't exactly household names, but will be familiar to theatre aficionados. Most of them have to play multiple roles in Wertenbaker's sometimes overtly Brechtian telling of the true-ish story of the early days of Australia, when some of the recently-arrived prisoners performed George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer.

Theatre review: Our Country's Good

Timberlake Wertenbaker's versions of Greek tragedy are among my favourites (I think she strikes a good balance between being true to the genre and clear, unpretentious writing) but I hadn't seen any of her own original work. Now her best-known play, Our Country's Good, gets a touring production and it's well-timed as well, since it coincides with the Donmar's revival of The Recruiting Officer, a play that features heavily in this one. Captain Arthur Phillip (Aden Gillet) is governor of the newly-established Sydney, New South Wales. He presides over the soldiers guarding prisoners who've been transported to Australia for crimes big or small back in England. After a traumatic 8-month sea voyage, the convicts are desperate and their lives chaotic, the soldiers take out their own frustrations on them, and Phillip wishes they could start anew without the brutal whippings and hangings that are a daily feature. When he suggests putting on a play might have a civilising effect, 2nd Lieutenant Ralph Clark thinks volunteering to direct it might help his chances of promotion, and The Recruiting Officer is chosen.