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The premise of the latest play being presented by the University of Manitoba’s Department of English Theatre, Film and Media Studies program is encapsulated in its title: Our Country’s Good.
It’s a premise that Dola Atkintan has been engaging on a far deeper level than most of her classmates in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 adaptation of the novel The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally. Atkintan came to study at the University of Manitoba from Nigeria and knows how the power of story can impact people’s lives.
Atkintan knows this impact because of the way that she was raised. “My parents and grandparents were just people who encouraged us to always be outspoken, but be respectful about it,” she said in an interview on Morning Light. “So, from a young age, it was just ‘say what you have to say, the best way you can.’”
In spite of this model, Atkintan – now in her third year at the U of M – was left to feel that studying theatre at the post-secondary level was an outlandish premise. That’s when she was instructed by theatre professor Bill Kerr to go see a play for class, and the rest was history.
“It was probably at that moment I was like, ‘Yeah, this is something I wanted to do for probably the rest of my life.’ Theatre has just brought me out of my shell and put me in places that I wouldn’t think I would be in.”
“We kind of all have that experience ourselves,” adds Kerr, who is also the director of Our Country’s Good. “At the end of the day, we’re trying to transfer knowledge, certainly, but also the heart and soul of the thing.”
The heart and soul of Our Country’s Good is an exploration of the impacts of colonialism. The play and its source material is based on the true story of the first fleet of convict ships to arrive in Australia. The governor (played by Atkintan in the play) decides to cast the convicts in a play – George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer – as a part of their rehabilitation program. All of this is done in the context of landing in a new place where traditions and cultures had been established since time immemorial.
“It’s both sort of joyous and deeply troubling at the same time,” explains Kerr. “That’s sort of what we’ve driven for is to embody both of those elements. We don’t want to say that theatre can’t be transforming – in fact, we really do want to say that. But at the same time, we have to be aware of the cost.”
The conversation about the cost is a pertinent one given the ongoing dialogue around truth and reconciliation in Canada and in Australia, but also in Atkintan’s home country of Nigeria. “It’s been really, I would say challenging and fun for me to embody this character,” she says, nodding to the nature of the play that Kerr describes. "He’s a very wonderful leader to these people, which is not so back home.”
“I’m living very much through the show and hoping that one day, it would somehow become reality for back home.”
Our Country’s Good runs at the Jack J. Conklin Theatre in the University of Manitoba’s Gail Asper Performing Arts Hall from April 2 to 5 at 7 p.m. with an additional 2 p.m. matinee on April 5. For tickets and more information, visit the department’s website.
