Abstract
Dispossession is a recurring theme in two of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s recent plays, The Grace of Mary Traverse and The Love of the Nightingale.1 Related to this theme is power. Why has this displacement occurred? Who has authorised it? Her exploration moves beyond suggesting that dispossession is a discrete condition by positioning it within a complex web of ideology which buttresses the power of the ruling elite.2 In so doing, Wertenbaker critiques the cohesiveness of the ideological apparatus which supports hegemony, implying that the fissures which such a critique exposes might effectively be used as the sites of social change. For her, the nature of social change is problematic. Whereas The Grace of Mary Traverse, like her later play, Our Country’s Good, ends optimistically, The Love of the Nightingale suggests that social change is a complex problem: how can we speak of oppression when language is itself shaped by the dominant ideology?3
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Notes
For a complete list to 1988 of the plays of Timberlake Wertenbaker, see Contemporary Dramatists, ed. D.L. Kirkpatrick (London: St James Press, 1988). Since 1988 Wertenbaker has published Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991).
By ‘ideology’ I mean the lived relation of people to their world. Importantly, this relation involves both our conscious sense of the world and our unconscious sense of it. For further explication of this use of ‘ideology’ see Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (1965; trans. London: Allen Lane [Penguin Press]. 1969).
For the sake of clarity and convenience I have chosen to focus this essay on two of Wertenbaker’s plays, The Grace of Mary Traverse and The Love of the Nightingale. Like The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country’s Good ends with sentimental optimism which obfuscates some of the contradictions which are raised by the play’s exploration of creating a new world. I explore these contradictions in another essay, ‘Our Country’s Good: Theatre, Colony and Nation in Wertenbaker’s Adaptation of The Playmaker’, Modern Drama, 34 (March 1991) 23-35.
Robert Crew, ‘Don’t Ask Wertenbaker Why They Named Her Timberlake’, The Toronto Star, 19 (December 1986) 20.
Hilary de Vries, ‘Of Convicts, Brutality and the Power of Theater’, New York Times, 30 September 1990, Section H, p. 34.
Contemporary Dramatists (see note 1).
David Ian Rabey, ‘Defining Difference: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Drama of Language, Dispossession and Discovery’, Modern Drama, 33 (Dec. 1990) 518–29.
Timberlake Wertenbaker, The Grace of Mary Traverse (London: Faber & Faber, 1985) n.p. All quotations are from this edition; page numbers are given in the text. This play was revised and published with The Love of the Nightingale by Faber & Faber in 1989.
Timberlake Wertenbaker, The Love of the Nightingale (Woodstock, Illinois: The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1990). All quotations are from this edition: page numbers are given in the text.
For a further exploration of these ideas see Teresa de Lauretis, ‘The Technology of Gender’, in Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987) pp. 1–31.
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Wilson, A. (1993). Forgiving History and Making New Worlds: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Recent Drama. In: Acheson, J. (eds) British and Irish Drama since 1960. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22762-4_11
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