In 1988, Max Stafford–Clark, the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, approached Timberlake Wertenbaker and asked her to write a play based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker. Wertenbaker accepted the commission, writing Our Coumry's Good' which, like its source, deals with historically based material: the penal colony in Sydney Cove (Australia) where, in 1789, a group of convicts managed by Second–Lieutenant Ralph Clark produced George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer in celebration . of the birthday of King George m. While the themes of prison, of colony and, consequently, of the English nation are common to works, Wertenbaker's adaptation is concerned primarily with theatre as a means of liberating people, because it offers them the chance to envision a future in which they are free, and of creating a community of players which serves as a paradigm for this utopian society. This focus on theatre and community marks a shift from Keneally's novel which is concerned with colony and, by extension, with relations of power which butrress the colonial enterprise. This radical shift occurs because Wertenbaker's adaptation simplifies many of the characters, most notably Ralph Clark and Arthur Phillip, the Govemor–inChief of the colony of New South Wales. In The Playmaker, Clark's and Phillip's personal relationships with the colonized – the convicts and the aboriginals – are extensions of their public roles as officers who are the agents of colonization; in Our Country's Good, both are represented as essentially good men under whose benevolent aegis the convicts produce the play, create a community and recover their humanity which gives them true freedom.