Our Country's Good: performance conventions

Our Country’s Good: performance conventions

Performance Conventions: Use of Multi-Roling

• Wertenbaker utilises the concept of multi-roling: certain actors playing more than one character. This can serve as a visual cue for the themes of transformation and the blurring of class boundaries.
• The same actor playing contrasting roles enhances the exploration of identity and biases. The stark differences between the characters each actor plays highlights the artificiality of societal roles.
• The constant role swapping can sometimes confuse the audience, mirroring the convicts’ experience of navigating a new social system and the effects of displacement.

The Staging: Minimalistic Elements

• The play employs a minimalistic staging design to reflect the barrenness of the Australian landscape and the simplicity of convict life. This simplicity focuses the audience’s attention on characters and their developments.
• Use of sparse props serves the dual purpose of representing the scarcity of resources amongst the convicts and allowing for smoother transitions between scenes and settings.
• Versatile elements like a bench or a tree stump might be used to denote different settings subtly, emphasising the narrative’s thematic elements over its locales.

Communicating the Passage of Time

• The non-linear structure of the play, with its multiple time jumps, reflects the fluidity of time and the convicts’ disorientating experience of it.
• Sudden scene changes indicate disrupted routines and sporadic events, underscoring the unpredictability of daily life in the colonies.
• The habitual day to night transitions communicated through lighting changes or dialogue, conveys the relentless nature of the convicts’ existence.

The Use of Offstage and Onstage Spaces

• Wertenbaker employs offstage spaces to symbolise the unseen brutalities of the new colony and the broader world beyond the confines of the stage.
• Onstage events draw the audience’s attention to the actors’ performances, underscoring the themes of theatre and performance within the social environment of the convicts.
• The distinction between onstage and offstage action often blurs, reflecting the blurred status of the convicts-turned-actors and their transformation into a theatrical community.