A Foucauldian Reading of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good in a Socio-Political Context

Abstract

One of the pioneering women dramatists of British literature, Timberlake Wertenbaker provides both a criticism of post-war Britain and propaganda of the ameliorating function of theatre in her play Our Country’s Good (1988). As a play based on the novel The Playmaker (1987) by Thomas Keneally, Our Country’s Good builds upon the issue of redemptive effects of theatre by portraying a group of convicts on a ship that takes them to Australia in the eighteenth century. Our Country’s Good portrays different authority figures consisting of those who believe in traditional means of punishment and who suggest the possibility of redemption through theatre as an alternative to severe punishment. It is possible to analyse the conflicting views of officers concerning the appropriate punishment methods of the convicts from a Foucauldian perspective. This reading draws on Foucault’s proposal of a penal reform that requires the use of carceral transformation through work and exercise resulting in the correction of delinquents’ behaviour. This paper focuses on the social function of punishment and analyses the representation of the conflation between theatre and punishment in Wertenbaker’s play in light of the dominant ideology concerning these issues in Britain in the Thatcher years.