Nationality United Kingdom Parents Charles Wertenbaker | Name Timberlake Wertenbaker | |
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Genre Modern theatre, original works and translations Books The ash girl, The grace of Mary Traverse, The Break of Day Plays Similar People Max Stafford‑Clark, John Man, Harold Bloom, Jean Bollack, Charles Segal | ||
Occupation Playwright, Librettist Education St. John's College (1966) | ||
Timberlake Wertenbaker - Interview | Digital Theatre+
Timberlake Wertenbaker is a British-based playwright, screenplay writer, and translator.
Contents
- Timberlake Wertenbaker Interview Digital Theatre
- Timberlake wertenbaker on the three musketeers reading in trees emily dickinson and more
- Background
- Career
- Themes
- Personal life
- Honours and awards
- Plays
- Translations and adaptations
- Radio
- Opera
- Screenplays
- Compilations
- References
Timberlake wertenbaker on the three musketeers reading in trees emily dickinson and more
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."
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
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:
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).