Playwrights and their stage works 

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

  1. This Is No Place for Tallulah Bankhead (produced 1978).
  2. The Third (produced 1980).
  3. Second Sentence (produced 1980).
  4. Case to Answer (produced 1980).
  5. Breaking Through (produced 1980).
  6. New Anatomies (produced 1981).
  7. Inside Out (produced 1982).
  8. Home Leave (produced 1982).
  9. False Admissions, adaptation of a play by Marivaux (produced 1983).
  10. Successful Strategies, adaptation of a play by Marivaux (produced 1983).
  11. Abel's Sister, based on material by Yolande Bourcier (produced 1984).
  12. The Grace of Mary Traverse (produced 1985). 1985.
  13. Leocadia, adaptation of the play by Jean Anouilh (broadcast 1985).
  14. Mephisto, adaptation of the play by Ariane Mnouchkine, based on a novel by Klaus Mann (produced 1986)
  15. Our Country's Good, adaptation of The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally (produced 1988). 1988; revised edition, 1990.
  16. The Love of the Nightingale (produced 1988).
  17. Pelleas and Milisande, adaptation of the play by Maeterlinck (broadcast 1988; produced 1989).
  18. Three Birds Alighting on a Field (produced 1991). 1991.
  19. The Thebans, adaptation of three plays by Sophocles (includes Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone) (produced 1992). 1992.
  20. Galileo's Daughter (2004)

Radio Plays

Television Plays

Prizes and awards