Timberlake Wertenbaker

Timberlake Wertenbaker (born 1951) is a British-based playwright, screenplay writer, and translator who has written plays for the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and others. She has been described as "the doyenne of political theatre of the 1980s and 1990s".

Wertenbaker's best-known work is Our Country's Good, which won six Tony nominations for its 1991 production. She has a propensity to write about political thinking and conflict, especially where there is a settled orthodoxy: "Then the rebel in me goes berserk, and I start pawing at it. I like the area where the questions are, and the ambiguities of political life, rather than the certainties."

Wertenbaker was born in New York City to Charles Wertenbaker, a journalist, and Lael Wertenbaker, a writer. Much of her childhood was spent 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 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. She was also the artistic director of New Perspective Theatre Company.

Currently, Wertenbaker is the Chair in Playwriting atthe University of East Anglia.In addition, she is artistic adviser to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and on the council of the Royal Society of Literature.

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.

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

• 1985Plays and Players Most Promising Playwright Award for The Grace of Mary Traverse
• 1988Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, Our Country's Good
• 1988Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New Play, Our Country's Good
• 1989Eileen Anderson Central Television Drama Award for The Love of the Nightingale
• 1989 Whiting Award for Drama
• 1990Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play (New York), Our Country's Good
• 1991Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for Best West End Play (London), Three Birds Alighting on a Field
• 1992Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Three Birds Alighting on a Field
• 1992Writers' Guild Award (Best West End Play) for Three Birds Alighting on a Field
• 2016 Writers' Guild Award (Best New Play) for "Jefferson's Garden"

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

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
• Winter Hill, 2017, Octagon Theatre Bolton

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)
• Léocadia 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? (BBC Radio 4)
• The Memory of Gold (October 2012 for BBC Radio 3)
• "Possession" Fifteen part adaptation of A.S. Byatt's novel (Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4)
• War and Peace a 10-hour adaptation of Tolstoy's novel (January 2015, BBC Radio 4)
• Adaptation of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels (2017, BBC Radio 4)
• In Search of Lost Time 10-hour adaptation of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (August 2019, BBC Radio 4)

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)