The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker by Sophie Bush (review)

Meticulous and wide-ranging, this is the longest "Theatre of … "volume in Bloomsbury's Critical Companions series so far. Sophie Bush's study, the first monograph on Timberlake Wertenbaker published in Britain, reads as a justified compensation for the relative neglect of a highly significant playwright, who turned 70 this year. Born in New York and raised in the French Basque Country, Wertenbaker has been a vital part of the landscape of British theatre since she moved to the UK almost four decades ago. According to Bush, however, her very "unwillingness to be categorised" explains in part the ambiguous reception of her plays, especially by the press (1). At the risk of falling into the sort of labelling exercise that Wertenbaker rejects, one may also argue that the twin commitment to feminism and internationalism that is integral to her work has influenced critics' responses. Both these elements feature prominently in the book, making it all the more significant in the current climate.

Bush offers an extensive account of Wertenbaker's drama, from her unpublished 1970s plays to the Arcola-produced The Line (2009). The latter, like many previous pieces, reimagines historical figures: the painters Edgar Degas and Suzanne Valadon in this case. The structure of the volume is mainly chronological, albeit with some thematic exceptions, such as the placing of Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991) alongside The Line in a final chapter dedicated to the role of art in society and its (qualified) utopian potential. The analysis benefits throughout from a detailed exploration of the playwright's archive, sold to the British Library in 1997, which is reported in order to show the financial precariousness faced even by successful stage writers. The archive reveals, for instance, that Wertenbaker has "never rewritten a play less than 4 times" (qtd. 5) and helps in tracing the evolution of some of these texts via the inspection of earlier drafts.

Our Country's Good (1988), Werten-baker's best known and most acclaimed play, occupies the middle section, with additional contributions by Sarah Sigal, on the dramatist's collaborative process with director Max Stafford-Clark and the Joint Stock company, Roger Hodgman, on directing the piece in Melbourne, and Debbie Turner on "Our Country's Good in the Classroom". These "professional perspectives" (143-80) provide a stage picture which is not always fully drawn in the rest of the study, yet it is Bush's insight that allows for the aforementioned canonical text to be understood within key debates about Wertenbaker's corpus as a whole. Countering opinions that see the convicts' play-within-a-play in Our Country's Good as a problematic adoption of "the language of the oppressor" (126), Bush interprets Wertenbaker's recurrent metatheatrical devices as "invoking the concept of actors' duality: their ability to inhabit two realities, two worlds, simultaneously". The theatre thus becomes "not just …a place where lost voices (and consequently lost identities) can be regained, but … a space for practising the increasingly vital art of bi/multiculturalism" (208).

Beyond the panoramic view on offer, the best moments in the book are those in which arguments such as the above are tackled with openness and lucidity, mirroring another of Wertenbarker's obsessions: the theatre as court. There, in the dramatist's own words (qtd. 71), "we are asked to decide on the guilt or innocence of our society, our lives, and to take responsibility for it".