Translating Timberlake Wertenbaker
Writer of Galileo's Daughter and Our Country's Good
Timberlake Wertenbaker is a fascinating playwright and it begins with her name.
Cyber portals also list this playwright as Wertenberger.
Curious.
Timberlake Wertenbaker,(my choice in this matter) has written many provocative works constantly challenging audiences with stylized questions about the strength and the fragility of the human spirit.
Gut-wrenching Love of the Nightingale is based on Sophocles' Greek myth and tragedy of Athenian princess Philomele, her sister Procne and her tyrannical brother-in-law Tereus.
Many of Wertenbaker's plays are based in historical / mythological background, which make her characters and play synopses intriguing. Well traveled and cosmopolitan in outlook, she has the uncanny ability to dramatize historical events in a way few playwrights can.
As a result, many of her plays are studied in university curriculums. Students have double the fun studying the fictionalized account while researching the actual historical events the play is based upon.
Wertenbaker's latest work, Galileo's Daughter, is another fine example of this device. It centres around the close and mysterious relationship between Italian inventor Galileo and illegitimate daughter Virginia, who is placed in a convent at age 13. Father and daughter form an unbreakable bond through a lifetime of letters.
Virginia, or Suor Maria Celeste, wrote 123 letters in ten years, words that helped Galileo through his darkest hours when he was branded heretic by the church for outrageous scientific claims.
Galileo's Daughter is based on Dava Sobel's book of the same name. Wertenbaker has also translated and adapted the work of playwrights Edward de Filippo ( Filumena ) Jean Anouilh ( Leocadio ) Pierre de Marivaux (La Dispute),Jean Racine (Phèdre) Sophocles and Euripides. She has also wrote the screen adaptation for Edith Wharton novel The Children. Like her contemporary, Caryl Churchill, Wertenbaker's women are feminist and feisty, and she likes to put her cast through the paces, as players take double acting duty (a cast of 12 in 22 roles, for instance). The two also share a similar bent for a complex tale.
To many the world over, Wertenbaker's best known and most performed work is the groundbreaking Our Country's Good dedicated to the memory of hangman John Price or John Ketch and based on Thomas Keneally novel The Playmaker. It is about the power of theatre and its liberating impact on a small but hopeful troupe of would-be thespians in the most Godforsaken place on earth: a convicts' colony on Botany Bay.
Life was unbearable in this filthy rat-infested Australian penal colony and Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the Marines who kept a diary of the camp's often dire events, had the courage to try something new. He wanted to present a play against the insurmountable odds of his environment and his fellow soldiers' negative attitudes.
Clark worked with the First Fleet convicts, through the power of theatre, to raise their spirits and make them forget, if only for a moment, their horrific surroundings and ensuing 'gallows-pole' fate in this poorer man's Tyburn "15,000 miles across the ocean".
Despite the mockery and brutality of the other officers in the camp, the convicts, encouraged by Clark, rehearse for George Farquhar Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer. Clark's final speech to them could be about Werternbaker herself, as they enter the makeshift wings: "...You must do your utmost to provide the large audience out there with a pleasurable, intelligible, and memorable evening."
