The Playmaker

Set in Australia during the early colonial era, Australian author Thomas Keneally’s historical novel The Playmaker tells the story of the great migration of mentally ill people, debtors, criminals, and other marginalized people from elsewhere in the British Empire to populate its nascent colonies. These people thought they would be sentenced to death, but were instead given a new (though harsh and forgotten) place to build their lives. The novel follows the rehearsal of a play by Farquhar, a playwright living in Sydney, which, ironically, can only be memorized and performed by Australia’s illiterate population. Like the novel itself, the play reflects on public ambivalence about the inexorable progression of British colonialism and the inequities of its criminal justice system.

At the beginning of the novel, Ralph Baker is shipped off to Australia after returning to England from the American settlement of Plymouth. Ralph wants to reunite with his wife, who remains in Plymouth. However, it is revealed that Ralph merely feels tied to his wife due to the contract of marriage. In Australia, he meets Mary Brenham, a thief also deported to the penal colony from England. He becomes infatuated with Mary, and his yearning for his wife erodes as the new relationship develops. He rationalizes his affair by bringing it into his conception of marriage, espousing a new view that it is permissible to have a different wife on each continent. He and Mary get married and conceive a child, but before it is born, Ralph returns to Britain without her.

Other vignettes explore the perspectives of the prisoners who were moved from Britain and the guards charged with guarding them. In the midst of these trying times, Ralph proposes that the prisoners, himself included, put on a production of The Recruiting Officer, a slapstick comedy by George Farquhar. Having little else to do and knowing that their time is limited anyway (most of them are in the lineup to be hanged), the prisoners sign up. Their interpretations of the play’s dialogue, characters, and setting enter an active discourse with their own perceptions of their predicament; that is, the result of being torn between their home and their strange, outcast Australian society. The cast members learn the performance by having the play read to them, line by line, by the few literate people in the colony. This strategy works quite well, considering that there are only two copies of the play in print in Sydney.



The Playmaker describes a complex coming-to-consciousness—not only of its characters, but of their nation. Having been cast out from England, the men and women of Australia are forced to create their own culture and form their own meanings. Ironically, these people who are forced out beyond the margins of English society are given an opportunity for self-renewal. Moreover, The Playmaker shows that all people have the capacity to create good communities and commit morally good actions. The origins of what we consider modern Australia are composed of the complex relationships between guard and prisoner, English citizen and outcast.