Funtington Players return with Our Country’s Good

Tony Clark is directing and has managed to assemble seven of the ten members of the cast who were due to perform the play two years ago.

Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker will be performed at West Ashling Village Hall from April 5-9 inclusive.

The play is set in the first penal colony in Australia and follows the extraordinary and sometimes hilarious story of their production of a Restoration comedy with a cast of convicts. Their success, achieved despite the brutality and many conflicts of convict and colony life, is heart-warming.

“A month before Christmas we did A Bunch Of Amateurs which went extremely well,” Tony said: “It was very popular with the audiences and I think doing a farce as our first production back was a good idea, just something very light hearted. In the opening of Our Country’s Good you hear the prisoners and somebody being flogged which isn’t exactly a cheery start!

“But it is great to get back to it. We were in rehearsals for it exactly two years ago and we were halfway through. It was obvious that the shutdown was coming but of course it was disappointing. It was just one of the many things that we had to endure but we were very good as a society in keeping in touch and doing play readings and doing quizzes and we managed to get ourselves through it all together as a group. And we were always determined to come back with Our Country’s Good when the time was right.

“The play has got a very interesting back story. It is based on fact about the first penal colony in Australia and how they moved from survival mode, just trying to run a colony, to thinking about how they would try to turn these people not into convicts but into the citizens of this new country once they had done their time. It was obvious that they were not going to go back. They were going to stay in Australia for perpetuity so they had to think about turning them into citizens, and one of the first things that they thought of was doing a play. They decided to do The Returning Officer.

“There was a book about what happened called The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker used it to write this play which was originally done as a commission at the Royal Court. They decided to do Our Country’s Good in rep with The Recruiting Officer with the same cast which must have been interesting to see.

“You get a bit of context but what you see is this group coming together and the final scene of the play is the opening scene of The Recruiting Officer. The theme of the play really is the redemptive power of the theatre. That’s the thesis and that’s pretty much what happens. These convicts are in some distress having been shipped in extremely difficult conditions across the world on an eight-month journey and they’re trying to set up this colony and they have no idea what they’re doing.

“It is all quite shambolic and they’re facing hunger and they’re all at each other’s throats in effect but the story is how this play sparks a community.

“It’s a cast of ten and seven of them are the same as before. I think our approach is not dissimilar to what it would have been two years ago. We’ve had a little bit more time to think about it but no, the approach has not changed.

“But we have tried to follow what they did when it was originally done. One of the features of the original production was that all the cast bar one played both an officer and a convict. They all see life on both sides of the fence and that’s what we have tried to do.”

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