Timberlake (Lael Louisiana) Wertenbaker
Playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker grew up in St Jean-de-Luz in the Basque country. Attended university in the United States. Journalist in London and New York. She was Resident Writer for 'Shared Experience' (1983) and the Royal Court Theatre (1984-1985).
Her plays include New Anatomies, first
staged at the ICA in London; Abel's Sister, first performed
at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1984; and The Grace
of Mary Traverse (1985), winner of the Plays and Players Most
Promising Playwright Award. She is best known for her play Our
Country's Good (1988), based on the novel The Playmaker by
Thomas Keneally. First performed at the Royal Court in 1988, it
was awarded the Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New Play and
the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play
and was nominated for six 'Tonies'.
The Love of the Nightingale (1989) was first performed
in 1988 at The Other Place, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford,
and won the Eileen Anderson Central Television Drama Award. Three
Birds Alighting on a Field (1992), a satirical portrait of the
art world, was first performed at the Royal Court in 1991 and won
the London Critics' Circle Best West End Play Award, the Writer's
Guild Award (Best West End Play) and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The
Break of Day (1995) was first performed at the Royal Court
in 1995 by Out of Joint theatre company, directed by Max Stafford-Clark,
and toured as a companion piece to Chekhov's The Three Sisters. After
Darwin (1998) was first performed at the Hampstead Theatre,
London, in 1988.
She has adapted and translated work by Marivaux, Anouilh, Maeterlinck,
Pirandello, Sophocles and Euripides. She also wrote the screenplays
for film adaptations of Edith Wharton's The Children and
Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. She is the author of
a television play, Do Not Disturb, and her work for radio
includes Dianeira, broadcast by BBC Radio 3 in November
1999, an adaptation and translation of Euripides' play Hecuba broadcast
by BBC Radio 3 in 2001, and adaptation of a Kadare novel The
H File and most recently Scenes of Seduction on
Radio 4 on 7 March 2005.
Timberlake Wertenbaker's most recent play, Galileo's Daughter, was performed
in Bath in 2004 by the Peter Hall Company.
Stage Works
- This Is No Place for Tallulah Bankhead (produced 1978).
- The Third (produced 1980).
- Second Sentence (produced 1980).
- Case to Answer (produced 1980).
- Breaking Through (produced 1980).
- New Anatomies (produced 1981).
- Inside Out (produced 1982).
- Home Leave (produced 1982).
- False Admissions, adaptation of a play by Marivaux (produced
1983).
- Successful Strategies, adaptation of a play by Marivaux (produced
1983).
- Abel's Sister, based on material by Yolande Bourcier (produced
1984).
- The Grace of Mary Traverse (produced 1985). 1985.
- Leocadia, adaptation of the play by Jean Anouilh (broadcast
1985).
- Mephisto, adaptation of the play by Ariane Mnouchkine, based
on a novel by Klaus Mann (produced 1986)
- Our Country's Good, adaptation of The Playmaker by
Thomas Keneally (produced 1988). 1988; revised edition, 1990.
- The Love of the Nightingale (produced 1988).
- Pelleas and Milisande, adaptation of the play by Maeterlinck
(broadcast 1988; produced 1989).
- Three Birds Alighting on a Field (produced 1991). 1991.
- The Thebans, adaptation of three plays by Sophocles (includes Oedipus
Tyrannos, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone) (produced
1992). 1992.
- Galileo's Daughter (2004)
Radio Plays
- Leocadia, 1985;
- La Dispute, from the play by Marivaux, 1987;
- Pelleas and Milisande, from the play by Maeterlinck, 1988.
Television Plays
- Do Not Disturb, 1991;
- The Children, adaptation of a novel by Edith Wharton, 1992.
Prizes and awards
- 1985 Plays and Players Most Promising Playwright
Award The Grace of Mary Traverse
- 1988 Evening Standard Award for Most Promising
Playwright Our Country's Good
- 1988 Laurence Olivier/BBC Award for Best New
Play Our Country's Good
- 1989 Eileen Anderson Central Television Drama
Award The Love of the Nightingale
- 1990 New York Critics Award for Best New Foreign
Play Our Country's Good
- 1991 Critics Circle Award for Best West End
Play Three Birds Alighting on a Field
- 1992 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Three
Birds Alighting on a Field
- 1992 Writers' Guild Award (Best West End Play) Three Birds Alighting on a Field