Our Country's Good, Lyric Hammersmith review - lively but patchy revival

The latest Greatest Hit to land at the Lyric is Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 award-winning play about a performance of Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer by British convicts in a New South Wales penal colony. 

It’s a piece about a true incident in the late 18th century that pulsates with contemporary resonances, a promising choice by the Lyric’s director, Rachel O’Riordan, who has been responsible for so many outstanding productions there. But for once her steady directing hand wobbles. What was impressive about the play originally, its bold mix of satire, social commentary, pathos and comedy, has become a less happy, patchier mix. 

It is weighted here, understandably, towards the evils of colonialism, offset with lashings of broad, knockabout humour. And actual lashings, of course, one of which opens the play. We are in the cruel world of Georgian justice, where humanity has largely gone missing, women sell their bodies for food and the hungry who steal to eat are hanged. 

We are also definitely in somebody else’s world, the world of the First Nation, one of whom, Killara (Namarra, pictured right), watches the marines arrive at this first penal colony. Wertenbaker has updated this role, taking guidance from a First Nation consultant. To Killara the British are true aliens who don’t understand the aboriginals' language or way of life. What they have brought with them, the play establishes, is a predatory culture that despoils all around it. It has also exposed the First Nation to a deadly pustulent disease, smallpox. And it’s a culture, KIllara notes, that happily destroys itself as well. Representing its worst excesses are sadistic Major Ross (Finbar Lynch) and his drunken acolyte Captain Campbell (Jack Bardoe).

In the opposing camp among the senior marines are the rationalists, who have brought with them an ingrained schooldays vision of a just society where people aspire to be responsible citizens and all, regardless of class, are potentially intelligent. The pompous governor (Harry Kershaw) spouts references to Socrates and Rousseau; he wants the convicts to be moved to higher thoughts too by immersion in the humanities. They find their entertainment in watching hangings: how much better an entertainment would a play be, he argues? It’s a cynical form of English pragmatism, even though it may have a worthy outcome. 

Wertenbaker’s text makes it clear that the naive junior officer, Ralph Clarke (Simon Manyonda), who takes up the challenge of staging a convict play is himself on the make, anxious to be recognised and promoted. He has a beloved wife at home, but his virtue proves questionable. Ralph is key to acting out the counterbalancing argument that there is a redemptive power in the arts, theatre in particular. As he spends more time with the convicts, his understanding of life’s injustices becomes more compassionate and less dogmatic, even as he prepares a personal betrayal. The role needs somebody with a more sophisticated grip on its complexity, alas, than Manyonda’s, to convey Ralph as fully three-dimensional.

The convicts — who also don redcoats and tricorns to double up as the officers in charge of them, a nice swipe at the precarity of social mobility in late 18th century England — seem your standard bedraggled mob, but are actually well individuated. Pickpocket Sideway (Nick Fletcher, pictured below) has an especially rich vein of humour to mine, as a self-styled “man of the theatre” who claims to have seen Garrick perform, but is clearly better acquainted with the belongings of Drury Lane’s patrons. Liz Mordern (Catrin Aaron), told to imagine she’s a rich woman, makes a barbed point by immediately miming somebody eating. 

As rehearsals progress, sometimes halting for the colony's hangman, Ketch (Lynch again), to measure up a victim, the untutored cons are a handy vehicle for jabs at the theatre. They question why plays aren’t about people like them, why characters say daft things that can’t be changed because that’s what the playwright wrote. Some of the references to actors’ quirks and theatrical mores predictably got easy laughs from the thespy press night crowd. But Dabby Bryant (Nicola Stephenson) squarely hits a current nerve when she questions why she has to play a milkmaid when it’s Farquhar’s dashing male lead, Kite, she understands and wants to be. (The real Bryant escaped the colony in 1791.)

Running throughout are the key metaphors of the piece: that a play is like a true colony, an expression of civilisation, a reminder of another way of life that makes people think — everything, in fact, that English colonialism is not. As a visual sign of its corruption, the set’s sandy ridges, out of which trees randomly spout, is slowly covered in rubbish, its vegetation uprooted.

It’s here the contemporary aims of the production appear centre-stage. The chairs littering the landscape are modern and plastic; the detritus features beer cans; the convicts wear jeans, hoodies and trackie bottoms; the incidental music is clubland-loud and brash. The staging is signalling that England is still in the grip of a trash culture, consuming itself and its underprivileged citizens. The liberal types in charge are ineffectual, their victories very minor ones in the face of this hellish tide. The faded Union flag that appears as a backdrop in Act 2 says it all.

Is it a country worth fighting for? As the performance of The Recruiting Officer nears, the cons do show some signs of having been changed by it. To greater and lesser degrees they have learnt the power of self-respect. Mordern surprises everybody by abandoning the convict code of omertà and defending herself to the officers who want to hang her, in elegant language Farquhar would have approved of. "now it matters," she states. Little Mary Brenham (Ruby Bentall) has grown as bold and forthright as her male-impersonator character, Sylvia.

But the potential pathos of these blighted lives, robbed of all dignity, has to compete with the rowdy pitch of the production. The constant febrile atmosphere doesn't allow characters to settle in a spotlight long enough to establish themselves fully; their speeches often seem dashed off, some even garbled. This is especially true of the portrayal of Harry. He's a pivotal character, a midshipman with terrible guilt about his role as a penal colony enforcer who is in love with convict Duckling Smith (Aliyah Odoffin). But he is delivered as an increasingly deranged, incomprehensible grotesque, his demise a curious offhand, offstage event. 

Provided you can keep up with the doubled (sometimes tripled) roles and odd 18th century locutions, though, this is still a lively evening with important things to say, but they would have been better said with a little more clarity and less volume.

• Our Country’s Good at Lyric Hammersmith until 5 October
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