From Empathy to Sympathy: Staging Change and Conciliation in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good

What is it about?

The book Trusting Performance (2011) argues that dramatic productions facilitate experiments that cannot be conducted in laboratories, thereby challenging cognitive scientists to consider the arts as essential companion-fields in the investigation of human embodied cognition. Chapter 3 discusses Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country’s Good, which dramatizes the events that led to a performance of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer by a group of transported convicts in Australia in 1789. Wertenbaker displays the heated discussions, confrontations, and violent interruptions that precede this public performance, as well as the remarkable effects of cooperation, empathy, and self-articulation that emerge during rehearsals. Crucially, I argue, the play within the play re-creates trust through correcting embodied experience: the participants’ bodies are in effect re-programmed, transforming a heterogeneous, hostile group of individuals into a civil community in which respect, trust, and affection are possible. Attending to Wertenbaker's ambitious claims for theatrical production, her explicit affinity with key premises of eighteenth century contractual political theories and Sentimentalist moral theories and, in addition, recent neuropsychological studies, this chapter intervenes in postmodern, post-structuralist lamentations of the isolation of the individual, suggesting instead that by sacrificing certain personal desires for the good of the “general will," through learning to cooperate in joint-effort projects, we may outweigh skepticism and brutality, and establish civic cooperation, trust and even love.

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Why is it important?

Marking 30 years since the original production of Our Country’s Good. The evidence presented in this chapter, including the testimonies of life-term prisoners who staged the play in Blundstone Prison in 1989, suggests forcefully that participation in dramatic production can instigate profound physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual transformation, affecting both individuals and their community at large.