The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker

Sophie Bush

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781408184790
• eBook ISBN: 9781408184097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker offers the first comprehensive overview of Wertenbaker's playwriting career which spans more than thirty years of stage plays. It considers the contexts of their initial productions by a range of companies and institutions, including the Royal Court, the Arcola and the Women's Theatre Group. While examining all of Wertenbaker's original stage works, Sophie Bush's companion focuses most extensively on the frequently studied plays Our Country's Good and The Love of the Nightingale, but also draws attention to early unpublished works and more recent, critically neglected pieces, and the counterpoints these provide.
The Companion will prove invaluable to students and scholars, combining as it does close textual analysis with detailed historical and contextual study of the processes of production and reception. The author makes comprehensive use of previously undiscussed materials from the Wertenbaker Archive, including draft texts, correspondence and theatrical ephemera, as well as original interviews with the playwright. A section of Performance and Critical Perspectives from other scholars and practitioners offer a range of alternative approaches to Wertenbaker's most frequently studied play, Our Country's Good.
While providing a detailed analysis of individual plays, and their themes, theatricalities and socio-historical contexts, The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker also examines the processes and shape of Wertenbaker's career as a whole, and considers what the struggles and triumphs that have accompanied her work reveal about the challenges of theatrical collaboration. In its scope and reference Sophie Bush's study extends to encompass a wealth of additional information about other individuals and institutions and succeeds in placing her work within a broad range of concerns and resonances.

The theatre of Timberlake
Wertenbaker

Sophie Bush is a writer-researcher specialising in contemporary theatre history and the processes of playmaking. Her doctorate, on the work of Timberlake Wertenbaker, was awarded by the University of Sheffield in 2011. She is a Lecturer in Performance at Sheffield Hallam University, and has previously taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Huddersfield and Manchester Metropolitan. She maintains an involvement with practical theatre-making, as director and devisor.

In the same series from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama:

THE THEATRE AND FILMS OF MARTIN MCDONAGH

by Patrick Lonergan

THE PLAYS OF SAMUEL BECKETT

by Katherine Weiss

THE THEATRE OF MARTIN CRIMP: SECOND EDITION

by Aleks Sierz

The Theatre of Sean O’Casey

by James Moran

The Theatre of David Greig

by Clare Wallace

Forthcoming titles in the same series from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama:

THE THEATRE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

by Brenda Murphy

THE THEATRE OF HAROLD PINTER

by Mark Taylor-Batty

MODERN ASIAN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 1900–2000

by Kevin J. Wetmore and Siyuan Liu

THE THEATRE OF BRIAN FRIEL

by Christopher Murray

BRITISH THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 1900–1950

by Rebecca D’Monte

THE IRISH DRAMATIC REVIVAL 1899–1939

by Anthony Roche

The theatre of Timberlake
Wertenbaker

Sophie Bush

Series Editors: Patrick Lonergan and Erin Hurley

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Floating Identities

1‘Good enough to go on’: The Beginnings of a Playwright

2‘They never went on quests’: The Gender of Identification

3‘To speak in order to be’: On Language and Identity

4Our Country’s Good: Three Professional Perspectives

Creating Our Country’s Good: Collaborative Writing Practice and Political Ideals at the Royal Court in the 1980s

Sarah Sigal

Our Country’s Good in Melbourne

Roger Hodgman

Our Country’s Good in the Classroom

Debby Turner

5‘The longing to belong’: On Cultural Genealogies

6‘Landscapes with figures in them’: On Pity and Tenderness

Conclusions

Notes and References

Chronology

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was made possible by the support and guidance of Critical Companions series editor Patrick Lonergan; Mark Dudgeon and Emily Hockley at Bloomsbury Methuen Drama; Maureen Barry, Chris Hopkins and Chris Wigginton at Sheffield Hallam University; Frances Babbage, Steve Nicholson and Bill McDonnell at the University of Sheffield; Richard Boon; Timberlake Wertenbaker; the British Library; the V&A Reading Room at Blythe House; Angela Bush and many other valued colleagues, friends and family members, too numerous to list.

For SJD

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.Melbourne Theatre Company’s Our Country’s Good. Set designed by Tony Tripp. Photography: Jeff Busby,

2.Melbourne Theatre Company’s Our Country’s Good. Photography: Jeff Busby,

INTRODUCTION

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Floating
Identities

Izena duen guztiak izatea ere badauke

Everything with a name exists

(Basque saying)

‘I think the whole thing about being a writer is that you have a floating identity’, Timberlake Wertenbaker told the journalist Hilary de Vries.1 Suzie Mackenzie gained a similar impression of the playwright: ‘In a sense, she might say, she has no country, no class, no culture. No language even. Or, to put it another way, what she has in the way of cultural inheritance, she has determined for herself.’2 This book proposes that the fluidity and mutability of identity embraced by Mackenzie’s statement and Wertenbaker’s concept of a ‘floating identity’ has been a continuous feature of the playwright’s life and work, both of which have resisted labels. This unwillingness to be categorised has, arguably, had an impact on the way Wertenbaker and her plays have been understood and critiqued, both in academic circles and amongst the press, with whom she has had, at best, an ambiguous, at worst, a fraught, relationship. This antagonism is another thread that runs through this book. Mackenzie’s willingness to accept Wertenbaker’s non-definitions is unusual, contrasting with some journalists’ specific, almost objectifying descriptions of ‘an attractive young woman of mixed French, English and American blood’,3 ‘a striking, dark-haired woman’4 or ‘a mature girl of warmth and grace who happens to be a playwright’.5 Such remarks, which seem to present Wertenbaker’s profession as secondary to her nationality, even to her appearance, may explain, in part, her desire to self-determine.

Wertenbaker’s career has spanned more than three decades, yet she has received far less scholarly attention than many of her contemporaries. While her 1988 play Our Country’s Good has been almost canonised through its wealth of awards, popularity with amateur and professional companies all over the world and long-standing inclusion on school and university syllabuses, many of her plays have not attracted the consideration they merit. This book attempts to counteract this phenomenon, highlighting the extent and quality of Wertenbaker’s oeuvre, while still giving detailed analyses of her best-known plays. It provides a comprehensive overview that foregrounds the development of the work, drawing extensively on archive materials, and maintaining a constant focus on issues of production and reception.

Wertenbaker is anxious that scholarship on her work should not impose false limitations on its potential meanings. This, she suggests, is ‘always a problem’, ‘because I don’t write political plays as such. […] Three Birds – it’s not a feminist play, and After Darwin […] touches on colonialism, but it’s not [purely] about that. […] [S]ometimes people don’t like it, because it’s not saying what they want me to say’. She hopes that her work does not fit into r...

Table of contents

• About The Author
• In the same series from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Floating Identities
• 1 ‘Good enough to go on’: The Beginnings of a Playwright
• 2 ‘They never went on quests’: The Gender of Identification
• 3 ‘To speak in order to be’: On Language and Identity
• 4 Our Country’s Good: Three Professional Perspectives
• 5 ‘The longing to belong’: On Cultural Genealogies
• 6 ‘Landscapeswith figures in them’: On Pity and Tenderness
• Conclusions
• Notes and References
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright