International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker Sophie Bush Maya E. Roth and Sara Freeman, eds. International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker. Dramaturgies: Texts, Cultures and Performances, No. 23. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008. Pp. 292. $66.95 (Pb). Given the extent of Timberlake Wertenbaker's oeuvre, Maya E. Roth and Sara Freeman's International Dramaturgy, the first full-length volume on [End Page 280] the playwright, is overdue and very welcome. Rather than address the gap in the market with a more conventional overview of the playwright's work, Roth and Freeman frame their collection around the "bold proposition . . . that all of Wertenbaker's plays can be understood as translations in some fashion" (13). As the editors point out, such a focus is well timed with the current academic interest in translation studies. The editors' manifest commitment to interdisciplinarity and cultural diversity deserves much praise. As the book's cover notes, contributions have been gathered from "varied countries, language traditions, and disciplines," authored by literary and theatre scholars, theatre practitioners, writers and directors, classicists, and historians. The sixteen chapters form an even spread across Wertenbaker's major published plays (those appearing in her two volumes of collected plays) and her Greek and French translations, but they do not address more recent works, such as Jenufa and Galileo's Daughter, or her earlier, unpublished pieces, many of which could fit well into the frame of study, as the editors acknowledge. Notable essays include Freeman's own "Group Tragedy and Diaspora: New and Old Histories of Exile and Family in Wertenbaker's Hecuba and Credible Witness," which explores Benedict Anderson's idea of "imagined communities" in relation to the displaced people of Wertenbaker's asylum play, Credible Witness. Freeman recognizes the hopeful quality of Wertenbaker's writing, which "reaches back to ancient Greek models [such as Hecuba and Trojan Women] but transforms the purgatory of exile into the potential of diaspora" (63). Equally impressive is Kate Bligh's "Oppositional Symmetries: An Anthropological Voyage through Our Country's Good and The Poetics." Bligh's examination of her hypothesis that "virtually every structural mechanism in Our Country's Good symmetrically opposes one of [Aristotle's] strictures" (177) proves there is still much academic mileage to be had from Wertenbaker's best-known and much-discussed play. In fact, Bligh's arguments provide some refreshing reassessments that counter the accusations of cultural imperialism sometimes laid against this text. Particularly astute is her reading of Wertenbaker's "reduction" of the Aboriginal presence within the play to one solitary figure as a reversal of an Aristotelian chorus: anonymous, observational, and representative of the (native) people. Bligh argues persuasively that this strategic diminution can be considered the counter-side to Wertenbaker's parallel expansion of Aristotle's recommended single protagonist to a community of subjects. Towards the end of the volume are two interviews with theatre practitioners: the American director Carey Perloff, who has collaborated with Wertenbaker on translations of Hecuba and Phaedra (interviewed by Roth); and the Egyptian-born Dalia Basiouny, a writer, director, performer, [End Page 281] and scholar who has translated The Love of the Nightingale into Egyptian. Basiouny's interview (conducted skilfully by Freeman) in particular adds a great deal to the volume. Basiouny seems to embody the volume's preoccupations most convincingly of all: her multicultural, multilingual, and multidisciplinary perspective is lived practice rather than matter for theoretical speculation. The editorial decision to arrange chapters neither chronologically nor "in 'formal' divisions" - there are no subsections through which to navigate the book's sixteen chapters - but in "dialogic clusters that jump from translations to new works" (26) creates some problems for the volume's overall clarity. Whilst the intention not to pigeon-hole the chapters or the plays they discuss is admirable, and one that Wertenbaker's own distaste for labels would no doubt support, the consequent loss of structure makes the book seem a little daunting. In her introduction, Roth voices the hope that this structure will "surface conversation across chapters" and "take a cue from Wertenbaker's own dramaturgy, where gaps and connections . . . foster critical engagement" (26). At times, the chapters...