ABSTRACT

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good (1988), as an adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker (1987), traces how a group of convicts, who are isolated in an eighteenth-century Australian penal colony, work together to produce George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer in celebration of the birthday of King George III. Arguably, Our Country’s Good is characterized by a kind of metatheatrical minorization of the major, a subtraction of the official State representatives, such as history, power structure, society, language, and text; the play is characterized by a polemicizing the sense of other spaces, and a form of threshold traversing that is rendered possible in the context of translation/adaptation and dramatic text/performance text in the theatre. This paper aims to analyze Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s theories—such as the concepts of deterritorialization, reterritorialization, lines of flight, and minor theatre—in order to explore how the dispossessed convicts traverse the threshold of “becoming other” via the historicized immigration of transportation, which opens up lines of flight and generates the unceasing mapping of a new life. I would like to suggest that Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good presents a subtle counterpoint between the major theatre and the minor theatre: whereas a major theatre seeks to represent and to reproduce the power structure of the dominant state apparatus, the minor theatre operates by disseminating, varying, subverting the structures of the state and major theatre. Such a contrapuntal agon finally leads to the celebration of the minor theatre, a theatre that works to highlight the recurrence of difference, and the recurrence of theatrical performance that is not a repetition of the same, but a series of variations.

KEY WORDS: Timberlake Wertenbaker, Our Country’s Good, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, deterritorialization/reterritorialization, the minor theatre