Our Country’s Good at the National Theatre, London SE1

3/5

THE PRACTICE of transportation — enforced exile — to Australia for the most insignificant misdemeanour was one which blighted the British legal system until 1868, by which time 164,000 had been sent to penal colonies, among them the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1830.

That’s the grim context of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play, an adaptation of a Thomas Keneally novel, which follows the misfortunes of a group of petty offenders arriving in Botany Bay in 1788.

Their misdeeds were not on the lengthy list of “crimes” which would automatically have qualified them for the noose.

Class hatred permeates, as viciously sadistic naval officers daily debase the prisoners and each other, force women into sexual servitude and use scarce food supplies for violent coercion and blackmail.

In this dispiriting milieu, Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark (Jason Hughes) decides that staging George Farquhar’s Restoration play The Recruiting Officer with the illiterate convicts will advance their re-socialisation as well as possibly humanise their jailers.

Farquhar’s play, detailing two womanising officers’ exploits while on a recruiting detail in Shrewsbury, resonates only too well with the budding thespians, who overcome initial misgivings to gradually take to the proceedings with gusto.

All this “frivolous liberalism” jars with the self-righteous bigots among the officers.

But the arguments about crime, appropriate punishment, human dignity, suffering and the solidarity needed in a new and foreboding environment continue throughout, laced with some sharp humour.

While the colonisers tear each other apart with much gut-wrenching drama, the insertion of a semi-detached, quasi-decorative Aborigine (Gary Wood) provides little if any elucidation beyond that of a visual geographic anchor.

“What was he all about?” asked one young audience member I overheard at the end.

The redemptive “play within a play” provides an optimistic conclusion, with a rousing song — Cerys Matthews’s music is an intriguing contemporary touch — and the infusion of hope into an apparently reconciled community.

Nadia Fall’s direction elicits three memorable performances from Ashley McGuire as a resourceful middle-aged Devonian, Jodie McNee as the damaged, reticent Liz Morden and Caoilfhionn Dunne as the studious and reflective Mary Brenham.

At nearly three hours long, the production has its longueurs. Few of its postulates are revelatory but as a revival of Wertenbaker’s engaging, albeit safe, play it will undoubtedly have its admirers.

Runs until October 1, box office: nationaltheatre.org