Lael Louisiana Timberlake Wertenbaker[1] (born 1946) is a British-based playwright, screenplay writer, and translator who has written plays for the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and others. She has been described in The Washington Post as "the doyenne of political theatre of the 1980s and 1990s".[2][3]
Wertenbaker's best-known work is Our Country's Good, which received six Tony nominations for its 1991 production. She has a propensity to write about political thinking and conflict, especially where there is a settled orthodoxy: "Then the rebel in me goes berserk, and I start pawing at it. I like the area where the questions are, and the ambiguities of political life, rather than the certainties."[2]
Biography
Wertenbaker was born in 1946[4][5][6] in New York City to Charles Wertenbaker, a journalist, and Lael Wertenbaker, a writer.[7][8] Much of her childhood was spent in the Basque Country in the small French fishing village of Ciboure.[7] 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."[9]
Wertenbaker was the resident writer for Shared Experience in 1983 and the Royal Court Theatre from 1984 to 1985.[10] 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. She was also the artistic director of the New Perspective Theatre Company. Wertenbaker was the Chair in Playwriting at the University of East Anglia from 2003 to 2023. She has also been on the Royal Society of Literature Council and was an Artistic Advisor at RADA.
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.
In 1997, the British Library acquired Wertenbaker's archive consisting of manuscripts, correspondence and papers relating to her writings.[4] Wertenbaker has a home in north London, where she lives with her husband, the writer John Man.
Honours and awards
1985 Plays and Players Most Promising Playwright Award for The Grace of Mary Traverse
Pity the Monster (Jermyn Street Theatre as part of 15 Heroines) (2020)
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 Preissová’s Jenůfa (Arcola), and Racine (Phèdre, Britannicus).
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