Adaptation After Darwin: Timberlake Wertenbaker's Evolving Texts

Adaptation After Darwin: Timberlake Wertenbaker's Evolving Texts SARA FREEMAN After Darwin, Timberlake Wertenbaker's play about the effect of Charles Darwin 's theories of evolution on late-twentieth-century social assumptions and moral imperatives, opened 8 July 1998 at the Hampstead Theatre in London. Manuscript evidence shows, however, that Wertenbaker had been chewing on ideas about how cultural hybridity, gender roles, and recent political upheavals interact with Darwin's theories for more than a decade. In the late 19808 she wrote a play also titled "After Darwin," which is unpublished, unproduced , and previously undiscussed in criticism. Read together, the two plays are revelatory because though they are concerned with the same issues and conflicts, they are wildly different. An exploration of the relationship between the two plays - what differs and what survives in the evolution of Wertenbaker 's texts - pinpoints the overall shift in Wertenbaker's work from an emphasis on gender to a focus on culture. Like the typescript, earlier plays in her oeuvre, notably New Anatomies (198I), Case to Answer (I980), and The Grace ofMary Traverse ([985) are propelled by gender analysis.' Later plays like Our Country's Good (I 988) and her most recent plays, After Darwin and Credible Witness (200I), probe colonialism and the interaction of cultures. This article compares Wertenbaker's I998 After Darwin with the earlier typescript titled "After Darwin," and the comparison yields useful insight into Wertenbaker's changing worldview, as well as her development of structure, character, and theme. In this comparison, however, the published text After Darwin and the typescript "After Darwin" cannot ultimately be given the same weight. As much as I and other researchers might be intrigued by thc typescript, which is a fascinating example of Wertenbaker animating feminist ideology and epic dramaturgy , it is not the text she chose to present to the world. In the introduction to the first volume of her collected plays, Plays One, Wcrtenbakcr mentions writing a play about a terminally ill millionaire, "singing whales and wise torModern Drama, 45:4 (Winter 2002) 646 Timberlake Wertenbaker's Evolving Texts toises" which she says "has remained comfortably in a drawer" (vii). This is the typescript "After Darwin," which is a sprawling play about the millionaire and other voyagers on a cruise that follows the same path as Charles Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos Islands, their journey interspersed with non-naturalistic choral passages spoken by tortoises and sea creatures.2 From Wertenbaker 's view, the typescript "After Darwin" is clearly not prepared for publication or public consumption. Indeed, at 108 pages, it is heavily marked and contains three versions of Act One, scene nine. It is also impossible to tell when exactly it was written. In Plays One, Wertenbaker refers to writing the play in her drawer after she wrote The Grace of Mary Traverse, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1985. This places the composition of the typescript at or about 1986. In the typescript, one character says "But in 1987," which is the only other - and admittedly tenuous - textual clue about date (58). By contrast, the After Darwin script published by Faber and Faber in 1998 is the authorized text, the one Wertenbaker saw through to production and prepared for a general readership. It must be accorded the status of representing Wertenbaker's personal and artistic decisions about how to explore the legacy of Darwin on stage. Significantly, it employs the device of a "playwithin -a-play," a technique that recapitulates the structure of her award-winning play Our Country's Good. Using this technique, one of her trusted strategies for structuring the interaction between past and present, Wertenbaker achieved greater complexity (wider thematic scope) through increased simplicity (fewer characters, more focused plot) in the published version of After Darwin. Yet. the typescript has traits - a humor, a fearlessness. a wildness, and a diversity of female characters - that are of value to scholars of her work and which are restrained in the published text. The following meditations on structure. character, and theme use the typescript to contextua1ize the published script, arguing that Wertenbaker rearranges her characters and reworks her theme through a complex strategy of reversal, substitution, and adaptation. The...