Defining Difference: Timberlake Wertenbaker's Drama of Language, Dispossession and Discovery

Abstract

Timberlake Wertenbaker's plays range from the domestic to the mythic within the duration of each single drama, as we witness the explosion of institutionalised terms of reference (identified with the dispossession and restriction of human potential) by public experience, and individual communication of that experience. Like Howard Barker and David Rudkin, she dramatises crises in definition and the existential compulsion to discover individual means of expression. Characteristically she locates the seeds of crisis in consequences of patriarchal-imperial impositions of definition; her plays strive towards the discovery of respect for human variety which surpasses the fearfulness of egocentricity. Individuals are challenged to perceive beyond restrictive or bloodied images of a future to discover a new personal idealism in enquiry, associated with the instinct of the child. Wertenbaker depicts paternalistic restrictions of responsibility, as manifested in the dispossession of speech as a right to selfhood, and the contrary reactions of marginalised characters, sometimes childlike in their eagerness and initial naIvete, attempting to construct and express their own senses of import and possibility in imaginative terms which, in the conclusions of her mature plays The Grace of Mary Traverse and The Love of the Nightingale, reach towards the poetically visionary in their vindications of metaphorical questings for meanings.