Defining Difference: Timberlake Wertenbaker's Drama of Language, Dispossession and Discovery

Defining Difference: Timberlake Wertenbaker's Drama of Language, Dispossession and Discovery DAVID IAN RABEY Timberlake Wertenbaker's plays range from the domestic to the mythic within the duration of each single drama, as we witness the explosion of institutionalised terms of reference (identified with the dispossession and restriction of human potential) by public experience, and individual communication of that experience. Like Howard Barker and David Rudkin, she dramatises crises in definition and the existential compulsion to discover individual means of expression. Characteristically she locates the seeds of crisis in consequences of patriarchal-imperial impositions of definition; her plays strive towards the discovery of respect for human variety which surpasses the fearfulness of egocentricity. Individuals are challenged to perceive beyond restrictive or bloodied images of a future to discover a new personal idealism in enquiry, associated with the instinct of the child. Wertenbaker depicts paternalistic restrictions of responsibility, as manifested in the dispossession of speech as a right to selfhood, and the contrary reactions of marginalised characters, sometimes childlike in their eagerness and initial naIvete, attempting to construct and express their own senses of import and possibility in imaginative terms which, in the conclusions of her mature plays The Grace ofMary Traverse and The Love of the Nightingale, reach towards the poetically visionary in their vindications of metaphorical questings for meanings. Case to Answer (first staged at Soho Poly, 1980) opens with the architect Sylvia training a gun on her scholar husband Niko, explaining' 'If I want to survive - and I do - I have to eliminate you. Your vocabulary again - until I find mine ... do you have anything to say?".1 The gun goes off in an ensuing struggle, but it is Sylvia who appears fatally hurt. Niko then addresses the audience, inducting them into an extended flashback depicting the build-up to this event. The sexual duel/debate in the study of a city flat locates Case to Answer in Pinter and Gray's characteristic dramatic territory; the dangerous play with the revolver and the struggle for ascendancy reflects Timberlake Wertenbaker's Drama 519 the more melodramatic aspects of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov's developments of dramatic naturalism. The main strength of Wertenbaker's play is the atmosphere of cumulative pressure identified by Sylvia in the"Six years of intense sex and a barrage of silence" that comprised her relationship with Niko. Not that he refuses to speak to her: he frequently pursues his own lines of meditations and intentions out loud for her edification, But he refuses to acknowledge her pain, proclaiming "I won't be interrupted anymore." Sylvia's unanswered questions burgeon into full-scale challenge, asserting that murder and rape can occur within domesticity and matrimony as well as in the imperially colonised countries whose suffering so preoccupies him. She claims that the freedom and equality he and other men have so graciously allowed her and other women are just that: allowances, fundamentally repressive desublimation: "the thinking, Niko, the decisions, the historical decisions, I mean, and the words, haven't you kept those to yourselves? Why, for example, is it so difficult for me to express myself to you? ... You're not interested in what we have to tell you." Niko, the sophist, is contemptuous of anything different to his own polished speech; contempt by which Sylvia finds herself paternalistically marginalised to the infantile: " I had the free associations of childhood. I threw them away, like an old toy. The marriage ring: silence." SJ.!e identifies oppression and cultural imperialism in his not allowing her her own language for all their fa,ade of "a marriage of equality." Nika, a Marxist, associates her concentration on "the delicate mechanism of the self" with privileged narcissism, whilst messianically viewing his own jargon-ridden sociological essays as a mission to aid the underprivileged. But Sylvia identifies herself more precisely with "People who feel they're not worth listening to." She claims "I'm your tourist island," idealized into inanimation, and accuses him of "theft of language"; "by continually ignoring my language, you made me feel it was inadequate. By making me doubt its value, you took it away from me ... Having frozen my language, you substituted yours, thereby transmitting your...