The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker offers the first comprehensive overview of Wertenbaker's playwriting career which spans more than thirty years of stage plays. It considers the contexts of their initial productions by a range of companies and institutions, including the Royal Court, the Arcola and the Women's Theatre Group. While examining all of Wertenbaker's original stage works, Sophie Bush's companion focuses most extensively on the frequently studied plays Our Country's Good and The Love of the Nightingale, but also draws attention to early unpublished works and more recent, critically neglected pieces, and the counterpoints these provide. The Companion will prove invaluable to students and scholars, combining as it does close textual analysis with detailed historical and contextual study of the processes of production and reception. The author makes comprehensive use of previously undiscussed materials from the Wertenbaker Archive, including draft texts, correspondence and theatrical ephemera, as well as original interviews with the playwright. A section of Performance and Critical Perspectives from other scholars and practitioners offer a range of alternative approaches to Wertenbaker's most frequently studied play, Our Country's Good. While providing a detailed analysis of individual plays, and their themes, theatricalities and socio-historical contexts, The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker also examines the processes and shape of Wertenbaker's career as a whole, and considers what the struggles and triumphs that have accompanied her work reveal about the challenges of theatrical collaboration. In its scope and reference Sophie Bush's study extends to encompass a wealth of additional information about other individuals and institutions and succeeds in placing her work within a broad range of concerns and resonances.

New Anatomies, Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country's Good, Love of a Nightingale & Three Birds Alighting on a Field

This second collection of Timberlake Wertenbaker's plays contains her work from 1995 to 2001. Diameira is published here for the first time. The collection also includes The Break of Day, After Darwin, Credible Witness and The Ash Girl, and is introduced by the author.

This collection provides the first full-length investigation of the oeuvre of one of Britain's leading dramatists: Timberlake Wertenbaker. By considering the polyglot playwright's theatre from translations and adaptations to new plays as a dynamic continuum of «translations and transformations», Maya Roth and Sara Freeman create an intriguing, focused frame for understanding Wertenbaker's work as distinctly cross-cultural, theatrically rich, and intertextual, providing a prescient case study of the translational turn emerging in international theatre today. The contributors investigate translation theory and practice through Wertenbaker's diverse linguistic and genre translations - from French, ancient Greek, and Italian to English, and from myth, history, classics, fairytale, and literature to the stage. Interrelated chapters by scholars and artists from varied countries, language traditions, and disciplines use performance studies, comparative literature, feminist theory, and cultural anthropology to position Wertenbaker's theatre as a critical nexus for analyzing - and imagining - cross-historical dialogues with contemporary audiences and our plural legacies. Thanks to its substantive engagement with the ethics, theories, and collaborative practices of theatrical translation and adaptation more broadly, and its equally rigorous examination of Wertenbaker's hybridic politics and poetics, this collection can serve as a useful resource for scholars and artists, both.

Modern British Playwriting: The 1980s equips readers with a fresh assessment of the theatre and principle playwrights and plays from a decade when political and economic forces were changing society dramatically. It offers a broad survey of the context and of the playwrights and companies such as Complicité and DV8 that rose to prominence at this time. Alongside this it provides a detailed examination based on fresh research of four of the most significant playwrights of the era and considers the influence they had on later work. The 1980s volume features a detailed study by four scholars of the work of four of the major playwrights who came to prominence: Howard Barker (by Sarah Goldingay), Jim Cartwright (David Lane), Sarah Daniels (Jane Milling) and Timberlake Wertenbaker (Sara Freeman). Essential for students of Theatre Studies, the series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and study of the theatre produced from the 1950s to 2009. Each volume features a critical analysis of the work of four key playwrights besides other theatre work from that decade, together with an extensive commentary on the period. Readers will understand the works in their contexts and be presented with fresh research material and a reassessment from the perspective of the twenty-first century. This is an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1980s.

This book offers the first major discussion of metatheatre in Australian drama of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It highlights metatheatre’s capacity to illuminate the wider social, cultural, and artistic contexts in which plays have been produced. Drawing from existing scholarly arguments about the value of considering metatheatre holistically, this book deploys a range of critical approaches, combining textual and production analysis, archival research, interviews, and reflections gained from observing rehearsals. Focusing on four plays and their Australian productions, the book uses these examples to showcase how metatheatre has been utilised to generate powerful elements of critique, particularly of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. It highlights metatheatre’s vital place in Australian dramatic and theatrical history and connects this Australian tradition to wider concepts in the development of contemporary theatre. This illuminating text will be of interest to students and scholars of Australian theatre (historic and contemporary) as well as those researching and studying drama and theatre studies more broadly.

This book examines definitions and the complex artistic, intimate and institutional means by which whiteness continues to be both resisted and reproduced.

This collection examines images of whiteness in literature, film, television, as well as ethnographic studies, and provides preliminary guidance to engage in anti-racist praxis and education.

Australia 1789. A young married lieutenant is directing rehearsals of the first play ever to be staged in that country. With only two copies of the text, a cast of convicts, and one leading lady who may be about to be hanged, conditions are hardly ideal... Winner of the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year Award in 1988, and many other major awards, Our Country's Good premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1988 and opened on Broadway in 1991. 'Rarely has the redemptive, transcendental power of theatre been argued with such eloquence and passion.' Georgina Brown, Independent It is published here in a new Student Edition, alongside commentary and notes by Sophie Bush. The commentary includes a chronology of the play and the playwright's life and work as well as discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created.

The Art Gallery on Stage is the first book to consider the representation of the art gallery on the contemporary British stage and to discuss how playwrights have begun to regard it as inspiration, location, focus or theme in an ever-more intense game of cross-fertilization. The study analyzes the impact on dramatic form and theatrical presentation of what has been a paradigmatic shift in the way art galleries and museums display their collections and how these are perceived, establishing a hitherto unexplored connection between modes of exhibiting and modes of representation. It traces a trajectory from plays that were initially performed in traditional theatres in accordance with a naturalistic play structure to plays that favour of a radical reconfiguration of visual representation. Indeed, since the beginning of the new millennium, playwrights and theatre-makers have increasingly experimented with new dramatic forms and site-specific venues, while forging collaborations with art makers and curators. The book focuses on plays from the 1980s onwards, such as Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution, Nick Dear's The Art of Success, Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Three Birds Alighting on a Field and The Line, David Edgar's Pentecost, Martin Crimp's Attempt on Her Life, Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Shoreditch Madonna and The Painter, David Leddy's Long Live the Little Knife, and Tim Crouch's My Arm, An Oak Tree and England, and considers the vital contribution to the field made by set designers. Ultimately, through this study, we come to understand how modern drama can offer a set of interpretative tools to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the social construction of art and, furthermore, the potential of theatre and the gallery space to question our fundamental cultural assumptions and values.