Senior Play: Our Country's Good

Based on Thomas Kinneally's novel ‘The Playmaker’, Timberlake Wertenbaker's best-known play celebrates the redemptive power of theatre. In Australia’s first penal colony, Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark proposes to stage Farquhar's ‘The Recruiting Officer’ to humanise the convicts through art. His plan is opposed by more conventionally minded officers, but Governor Phillip, wishing to ‘help create a new society in this colony’, gives his blessing to the project.