International Dramaturgy: Translation & Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker

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.