'Our Country's Good' falters with slow development

Following a group of desperate criminals in Australia's first prison colony, this weekend's University Productions show had the potential to be a truly compelling drama.

Yet in spite of its talented cast, "Our Country's Good" never broke out of its own prison.

Even with graphic whipping and sex scenes, "Our Country's Good" took more than half of its three-hour running time to involve the audience. For the viewers who did return after intermission, their patience was rewarded, although it was too little, too late.

This obscure drama never allowed audience members to identify with convicts and prison guards trapped in a foreign land. A gap of 200 years and thousands of miles combined with the immeasurable societal gap between the audience and the characters pr

Courtesy of Our Country's Good Daniel Kahn, Aaron Sherry, Dominique Morriseau, Joshua Parrott, Nick Gabriel and Andrew Bielski portray guards and criminals.

oved too much for Timberlake Wertenbaker's writing to bridge.

Wertenbaker attacked the question of whether a criminal can be reformed. The guards decided to educate the prisoners by putting on a play. This process changed the convicts in the cast from savages into compassionate human beings.

Until this change took place, the lack of characters to identify with detracted from the superb display of emotional acting. In particular, Brendan McMahon, in the role of guilt-ridden prison guard Harry Brewer, reproduced in an outright eerie manner a broken man losing his sanity to ghosts.

In comparison to the fear inspired by his creepy performance, the two leads Andrew Bielski and Julia Siple seemed saccharin and out of place in this drama about desperation.

Yet many of the actors conveyed the transformation of the prisoners in a very realistic manner. During the second rehearsal in the play, the convicts' fears induced by the threats of Major Ross, a leader of the colony opposing the play, were palpable. This scene displayed, in a culmination of tension, the difference in the convicts' reactions to intimidation and education.

All these powerful parts of the performance, however, took place in the second act. The first act contained only exposition, merely setting up the conflicts for the rest of the drama.

Since all of the convict characters, and several of the guards, came across as mere animals in the first half, the audience lost interest in their activities. Dominique Morisseau's angry performance as convict Liz Morden and Angela Lewis's mood swings as Duckling Smith, although convincing, didn't push the audience out of their indifference.

In particular, the scenes dragged where the authorities of the prison discussed the play's fate or possible hangings of prisoners. Although necessary to establish the conflict between vicious Major Ross, played by Joshua Parrott, and Daniel Kahn as the civilized Captain Arthur Phillip, these scenes held no interest for an audience that didn't identify with the convicts' situation.

With less time devoted to setting up the story line, this play could have expressed the importance of efforts to reform criminals very effectively. The setting, however, muddled the relationship of the situation to today's political debates on the fate of overcrowded jails and the death penalty. Even with the plot based in real events, this story, at least during the first act, seems like a relic from another time that should have been left there.

02-15-99