Playmaker

Lieutenant Ralph Clark has received the most bizarre of commissions.

In honour of the king’s birthday, Clark is charged with staging a production of the George Farquhar comedy The Recruiting Officer . What’s more, as Clark supervises the penal colony of Sydney Cove, Australia at the very end of the late-nineteenth-century British Empire’s rule, he must use his prisoners as the cast and production crew. Based on the lieutenant’s real diaries, The Playmaker is a work of true genius by one of the most notable names in historical fiction.