In trying to learn about Timberlake Wertenbaker, it is best to begin in a tiny house in an unfashionable neighborhood in the north of London. There is a front gate that swings stubbornly on its rusty hinges, the burbled sound of children playing in a nearby back garden, the watery sunlight dappling the unkempt yards.
These are the details, few and jealously guarded, that one gleans from Wertenbaker`s life. She is at once intensely private and acclaimed-an English dramatist now in same league as Jim Cartwright, Doug Lucie and Nick Dear, writers barely known in America but hailed in Britain as the next generation of Angry Young Men.
She is a playwright of notoriously obscure background, an artist of deliberate anonymity whose very name seems invented (it isn`t). She has been working steadily in theater for only a decade, the author of a few
translations and several original plays, most well-received. But it wasn`t until two years ago, when Wertenbaker`s ”Our Country`s Good” opened at London`s Royal Court Theatre, that she began earning international reknown.
Her play, about the first theater performance in Sydney in the 18th Century, received excellent reviews. Critics applauded its nimble
theatricality, its sinewy intelligence, which probed philosophic questions with a clever blend of humor and pathos. It won the Olivier Award-London`s equivalent of Broadway`s Tony-for Best Play that year, and Wertenbaker was named Most Promising Playwright. Next year, ”Our Country`s Good” returned to the Royal Court in an encore performance before traveling to Toronto. A second production opened in Australia. Last fall, ”Our Country`s Good” had its American premier in Los Angeles, and today it has its Chicago premiere in a production by Remains Theatre at Bailiwick Repertory.
Meanwhile, the playwright has finished her first screenplay, is at work on a second, while also writing her first opera, and trying to finish her newest drama. She also, on this particular Sunday, has just returned from visiting the Australian tour of ”Our Country`s Good.” Extremely jetlagged, she is attempting to mow her postage-stamp-sized lawn and serve coffee to a visitor.
Talking to Wertenbaker is an exercise in verbal chess playing. She is thirtysomething, small-boned, with fine skin, pretty, but in a brisk, Gloria Steinem-beside-the-point way.
”I just want to go on writing plays,” she says, making it sound very much like a plea. And in her throaty, cultured and oh-so-English-accented voice (she was educated in the United States) Wertenbaker artfully dodges all troublesome questions, especially those pertaining to her private life.
She was raised in the Basque region of France, educated in America
(obtaining a degree in philosophy) and spent the early part of her career working as a journalist in New York.
To discover her roots as a dramatist, one must begin in Spetse, Greece, where, in the late 1970s, Wertenbaker was teaching English. She became involved in a local theater troupe and wrote her first plays for children.
”Yes, for children,” she says. ”But that was just for a short time; I also wrote plays for adults, too.”
Wertenbaker returned to England and began collaborating with London`s fringe theaters, the Soho Poly and the Women`s Theatre Group. But it wasn`t until she spent six months working with Mike Alfred`s innovative Shared Experience company, in a stage adaptation of ”Arabian Nights,” that she began to find her own dramatic voice, one which she describes as non-naturalistic and based on an ability to put ”a literary text on the stage but . . . giving it theatrical presence.” By 1984, Wertenbaker was writer in residence at the prestigious Royal Court, the same theater that had launched such British dramatists as John Osborne and Caryl Churchill.
”It`s her intelligence and her ability to dramatize ideas that make Timberlake unusual,” says Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court and its director of ”Our Country`s Good.” ”Most writers find it difficult when not writing from experience, but she likes to write about people discussing ideas.”
Indeed, up until ”Our Country`s Good,” critics had often found Wertenbaker`s work intellectually rigorous but frequently didactic. She had a reputation for writing challenging if instructional plays (”The Grace of Mary Traverse,” ”Abel`s Sister”) and letter perfect translations (Marivaux`s
”Successful Strategies” and ”False Admissions”).
”I don`t analyze my plays,” says Wertenbaker, when asked about changes in her work. ”I think playwrighting is like ferreting, you follow your nose. I don`t think you should have come to a decision (before) you write. As a dramatist, you put the possibilities out there, but you don`t already know what you want to say.”
For Wertenbaker, that creative search begins with ”visualizing the scenes somewhere between the actual landscape and the stage version.” She says she proceeds ”inside out,” working a lot on the development of characters and scene structure before she writes. ”I plan the structure of the scenes and whatever gets said, gets said. I never start with dialogue.”
And she prefers working within an historical context, using it as both a shield and a shortcut. ”I feel that an audience comes to (a modern drama)
with a lot of prejudice and expectation, and I want to get to the heart of the action as soon as possible,” she says. ”Setting a play in the past frees you, you can be much more free with language.”
While ”Our Country`s Good,” is similar in theme and structure to Wertenbaker`s other work-a drama spun from historical incident and literary precedent-it was unique in its genesis. ”It was a new work process for her,” says Stafford-Clark about the breakthrough play. ”She worked closely with a group of actors in improvisational workshops. (The resulting script) marks a maturing of her work.”
”We had these famous `beating` workshops, where the actors just got beaten-I mean with newspapers,” says Wertenbaker with a laugh. ”It sounds quite exotic, but if you do it long enough, you begin to see the nature of arbitrary brutality.” After several weeks of this collective improvisation in which author and actors also interviewed and observed prisoners performing plays, Wertenbaker retired to her house and wrote steadily for three months. What emerged was a script, based partly on Robert Hughes` historical tract on Australia, ”The Fatal Shore,” and mostly on Thomas Keneally`s novel ”The Playmaker,” which recounted the first theatrical production in Australia, the 1789 performance in Sydney Cove by English criminals of George Farquhar`s
”The Recruiting Officer.” Directed by Stafford-Clark and with the actors double-cast as both English officers and convicts, ”Our Country`s Good”
played as a clever and illuminating companion piece to the Royal Court`s revival last year of ”The Recruiting Officer.”
”Max originally asked me if I would adapt Keneally`s novel to go along with the Farquhar,” says Wertenbaker. ”And I said I didn`t adapt novels and that I wanted to find a more modern resonance.” What emerged was a richly theatrical work exploring ”what it means to be brutalized, what it means to live without hope and how theater can be a humanizing force,” explains the author.
Stafford-Clark adds that the play contains three scenes that best illustrate Wertenbaker and her concerns as a playwright, scenes which at their core are philosophic discussions about the transforming power of theater, rational man`s ability to transcend his circumstances, and the power of language. In each case, it is Wertenbaker`s richly drawn female protagonists who lead the way.
”It`s actually quite a good time to be a woman in theater,” says Wertenbaker. ”Because history is being directed by women at the moment, and not just Margaret (Thatcher), who is a disaster, but women in general are more active politically. . . . (On the other hand) I don`t know what (feminism)
means. I live my life in feminist terms; I earn my own living; I am independent. But when someone asks me if I am a feminist writer, I just don`t know what they mean . . . I think the whole thing about being a writer is that you have a floating identity.”
