Forgiving History and Making New Worlds: Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Recent Drama

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 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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