Timberlake Wertenbaker

Timberlake Wertenbaker
Born	New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Playwright, Librettist
Nationality	United Kingdom
Genre	Modern theatre, original works and translations

Timberlake Wertenbaker is a British-based playwright, screenplay writer, and translator.

Background

Wertenbaker grew up in the Basque Country in the small fishing village of Ciboure. She has been described as possessing a "characteristic reticence"; she has indicated that this may spring partly from her upbringing in Ciboure: "One thing they would tell you as a child was never to say anything because you might be betraying someone who had done something politically or whatever. So I was inculcated with this idea of emotional privacy."

Wertenbaker graduated with a bachelor's degree in liberal arts from St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland in 1966.

Career

Wertenbaker was the resident writer for Shared Experience in 1983 and the Royal Court Theatre from 1984 to 1985. She was on the Executive Council of the English Stage Company from 1992 to 1997 and on the Executive Committee of PEN from 1998 to 2001. She served as the Royden B. Davis professor of Theatre at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., for 2005-06. She was the Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Freud Museum in 2011.

Currently, Wertenbaker is the Chair in Playwriting at the University of East Anglia. She is also the artistic director of Natural Perspective Theatre Company. In addition, she is artistic adviser to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and on the council of the Royal Society of Literature.

Themes

Central topics in her work are the efforts of individuals, particularly women: pursuing quests, seeking change, breaking boundaries, and constructing or challenging gender roles. A central technique is the revisioning of actual or imaginary lives from the past, sometimes remote in place as well as in time.

There is a further recurring theme in her work: displacement. In her plays, characters are often removed from the familiarity of home and are forced to live in new cultures, sometimes defined by national boundaries, other times by cultural and class divisions. From this central theme emerge related themes, including isolation, dispossession, and the problem of forging an identity within a new cultural milieu. In her work, individuals often seem to assume roles, as if identity were a matter of persons performing themselves. Wertenbaker’s work also demonstrates a keen awareness that communication occurs through language that often inadequately expresses experience.

Personal life

She has a home in north London, where she lives with her husband John Man. They have one daughter.

Honours and awards

• 1985 Plays and Players Most Promising Playwright Award for The Grace of Mary Traverse
• 1988 Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, Our Country's Good
• 1988 Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New Play, Our Country's Good
• 1989 Eileen Anderson Central Television Drama Award for The Love of the Nightingale
• 1989 Whiting Award for Drama
• 1990 Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play (New York), Our Country's Good
• 1991 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for Best West End Play (London), Three Birds Alighting on a Field
• 1992 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Three Birds Alighting on a Field
• 1992 Writers' Guild Award (Best West End Play) for Three Birds Alighting on a Field

Wertenbaker was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.

Works

Wertenbaker is currently writing a new play for Out of Joint Theatre Company.

Plays

She has written plays for the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and other theatres:

• This Is No Place for Tallulah Bankhead, 1978
• The Third, 1980
• Second Sentence, 1980
• Case to Answer, 1980
• Breaking Through, 1980
• New Anatomies, 1981
• Inside Out, 1982
• Home Leave, 1982
• Abel’s Sister, 1984
• The Grace of Mary Traverse, 1985
• Our Country's Good, 1988
• The Love of the Nightingale, 1989
• Three Birds Alighting on a Field, 1992
• The Break of Day, 1995
• After Darwin, 1998
• Dianeira, 1999 (radio)
• The Ash Girl (adaptation of "Cinderella"), 2000
• Credible Witness, 2001
• Galileo's Daughter, 2004
• Scenes of Seduction, 2005 (radio)
• Divine Intervention, 2006
• The Love of the Nightingale, (Opera) Music by Richard Mills (PIA - 2006 & Sydney Opera House, 2011)
• Jenůfa by Gabriela Preissova (adaptation), 2007
• Arden City (For the National Theatre Connections program), 2008
• The Line, 2009
• Our Ajax, 2013 - Southwark Playhouse, produced by Karl Sydow and Supporting Wall
• The Ant and the Cicada, 2014
• Jefferson's Garden, 2015

Translations and adaptations

Her translations and adaptations include several plays by Marivaux (Shared Experience, Radio 3), Sophocles’ Theban Plays (RSC), Euripides’ Hecuba (ACT, San Francisco), Eduardo de Filippo, Gabriela Preissova’s Jenufa (Arcola), and Racine (Phèdre, Britannicus).

• Mephisto by Ariane Mnouchkine (1986)
• Leocadia by Jean Anouilh (1987)
• False Admissions; Successful Strategies; La Dispute: Three Plays by Marivaux (1989)
• The Thebans by Sophocles (1992)
• Filumena by Eduardo De Filippo (1998)
• Hecuba by Euripides (2001) (radio)
• Hippolytus by Euripides (2009)
• Phedre by Jean Racine (2009)
• Elektra by Sophocles (2010 & 2012)
• Antigone by Sophocles (2011)
• Britannicus by Jean Racine (2011)

Radio

• What Is the Custom of Your Grief? (15-part adaptation of A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession for BBC Radio 4)
• The Memory of Gold (October 2012 for BBC Radio 3)
• War and Peace (10-hour adaptation of Tolstoy's novel for Radio 4), 1 January 2015

Opera

• The Love of the Nightingale, music by Richard Mills (Perth International Arts Festival 2006, Opera House 2011)

Screenplays

• The Children (directed by Tony Palmer, adapted from Edith Wharton)
• Do Not Disturb

Compilations

• Plays, Vol. 1: New Anatomies; The Grace of Mary Traverse; Our Country's Good; The Love of the Nightingale; Three Birds Alighting on a Field (Faber and Faber)
• Plays, Vol. 2: The Break of Day; After Darwin; Credible Witness; The Ash Girl; Diianeira (Faber and Faber)

External links

• Mark Lawson, "Timberlake Wertenbaker: ‘You can’t get a straightforward history of America’", The Guardian, 7 February 2015.
• Profile and Production History at The Whiting Foundation