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Plays 1: New Anatomies / The Grace of Mary Traverse / Our Country's Good / The Love of the Nightingale / Three Birds Alighting on a Field
New Anatomies, Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country's Good, Love of a Nightingale & Three Birds Alighting on a Field
445 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 6, 2025
Timberlake Wertenbaker's plays are known as interpreting as the voice of feminine liberation, but even more that, they represent the voice of political rebellion from the fifties until the eighties, when they spoke out angrily against Mrs Thatcher’s free market economic policies. Her plays are characterised by strong female roles, and although the plays might have an apparently large cast, only two to four persons have serious roles in them.
The first play, ‘New Anatomies,’ is about gender, racial and, to an extent, about national and international politics. Based on a true history, it is set in that period of history when women avoided other women who preferred men’s clothes to their own, and their own sex to the opposite. Shunned in Europe for her odd habits, she initially finds refuge in Algeria dressed as a man. With innate courtesy, the men accept her at first, pretending not to have known that she is a woman. Later, they suspect her of being a spy for the French government. She finds no relief from her own government, and no mercy from the Algerians.
‘Our Country’s Good,’ probably one of her best-known plays, is a straight adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel, ‘The Playmakers,’ but it is also a critique of the way prison or prison colonies were run, and the idea that no convict was capable of reformation and of being a useful member of society.
‘The Grace of Mary Traverse’ is essentially a feminist play, which demonstrates the effects of severe repression of even the thoughts, speech and deportment of a moderately well-to-do woman. The act of rebellion that follows is paralleled in the Gordon Riots, in which the government demonstrated its own fears of the raging of a hungry mob.
‘The Love of the Nightingale’ is an adaptation of Ovid’s story of the rape of Philomele and her mutilation. It is a familiar story of male brutality and female revenge, but it is also a play about the dissensions and discords within Tereus's kingdom and family.
‘Three Birds Alighting on a Field’ is about the artificiality of the art world, along with its contempt for quality, beauty and true art. The play is also a not-so-sly dig at Thatcherite consumerist economic policies.
The first play, ‘New Anatomies,’ is about gender, racial and, to an extent, about national and international politics. Based on a true history, it is set in that period of history when women avoided other women who preferred men’s clothes to their own, and their own sex to the opposite. Shunned in Europe for her odd habits, she initially finds refuge in Algeria dressed as a man. With innate courtesy, the men accept her at first, pretending not to have known that she is a woman. Later, they suspect her of being a spy for the French government. She finds no relief from her own government, and no mercy from the Algerians.
‘Our Country’s Good,’ probably one of her best-known plays, is a straight adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel, ‘The Playmakers,’ but it is also a critique of the way prison or prison colonies were run, and the idea that no convict was capable of reformation and of being a useful member of society.
‘The Grace of Mary Traverse’ is essentially a feminist play, which demonstrates the effects of severe repression of even the thoughts, speech and deportment of a moderately well-to-do woman. The act of rebellion that follows is paralleled in the Gordon Riots, in which the government demonstrated its own fears of the raging of a hungry mob.
‘The Love of the Nightingale’ is an adaptation of Ovid’s story of the rape of Philomele and her mutilation. It is a familiar story of male brutality and female revenge, but it is also a play about the dissensions and discords within Tereus's kingdom and family.
‘Three Birds Alighting on a Field’ is about the artificiality of the art world, along with its contempt for quality, beauty and true art. The play is also a not-so-sly dig at Thatcherite consumerist economic policies.
June 16, 2024
New Anatomies: 2/5 - a mostly unremarkable very early play.
The Grace of Mary Traverse: 4/5 - oh NOW we're talking. Big historical epic with great sex. And great women.
Our Country's Good: 4/5 - a GCSE staple, though I was never taught it. Coming to it now it seems more formally innovative and unabashedly political than I'd imagined. Deep with empathy.
The Love of the Nightingale: 3.5 - a free adaptation of the Philomela myth. Earthy in its language, potent in its imagery.
Three Birds Alighting on a Field: 3/5 - I liked it, it's witty, but it is a play where rich people talk about art a lot.
The Grace of Mary Traverse: 4/5 - oh NOW we're talking. Big historical epic with great sex. And great women.
Our Country's Good: 4/5 - a GCSE staple, though I was never taught it. Coming to it now it seems more formally innovative and unabashedly political than I'd imagined. Deep with empathy.
The Love of the Nightingale: 3.5 - a free adaptation of the Philomela myth. Earthy in its language, potent in its imagery.
Three Birds Alighting on a Field: 3/5 - I liked it, it's witty, but it is a play where rich people talk about art a lot.
September 2, 2017
New Anatomies: This play deals with some of the liberated transvestite women who, during the late 19th and early 20th century, wore men's clothes and assumed increasingly public social roles. But one of the things I find really interesting is the distinction between the fashionable bohemian ladies of Paris or Marrakesh, who remain clearly women even as they dress in men's clothing, and Isabelle who adopts her Arab persona Si Mahmoud as a primary identity. While on the surface these gender disrupting performances bear much in common, Isabelle is largely rejected and reviled by society because she refuses to continue accepting the underlying logic of French society, choosing instead to identify entirely with the Sufi culture that welcomes Si Mahmoud as a brother and an equal in his quest for wisdom.
The Grace of Mary Traverse: This play strikes me as a kind of feminist version of Stephen Jeffreys' The Libertine. It deals with the dangers of power, the quest for knowledge, and the desire to change the world. In that sense, I suppose it doesn't immediately sound like The Libertine, but where the two plays strike me as similar is in the protagonist's quest for knowledge, and how destructive that pursuit turns out to be. But equally interesting is how little the protagonists seem to actually repent of all they lose in their quest--both make gestures of repentance, but it isn't clear (at least as I read the plays) that these are genuine or deeply felt repentances. Rochester in The Libertine converts on his deathbed, but it isn't clear that it's a sincere conversion, and Mary rejects her quest for experience after the horrific riot she is manipulated into starting, but she remains existentially discontented and convinced that there is some true experience to which she never had access.
Our Country's Good: This was the play I was most looking forward to in this collection, and it didn't disappoint. I love adaptations because they give us a chance to renegotiate with our past (in an interesting coincidence, I write this as the US is in the midst of debates on whether we should keep Confederate statues in public places, and much of that debate revolves around the question of "erasing" history or historical misremembering). Obviously history is not innocent--though the paradox is that it is not guilty either--but rather one's sense of history is determined by the position one takes. Wertenbaker here takes a position critically distant from Farquahar's light comedy The Recruiting Sergeant, when she imagines the first performance of the play in the Australian penal colony of New South Wales in the late 1790s. Here the play takes on an ambiguous message because the context demonstrates just how little innocence there was in British Imperialism, in the foundation of what would become Australia, and in the trickery utilized by British army and navy recruiters to shanghai people into service. When the play is performed in a penal colony--with its attendant attitudes dehumanizing the prisoners, of sexual violence, of brutal punishment, etc. the ethos of the British military loses much of the joviality of Farquahar's original play and comes to be seen as part of a cultural toolkit for imperialism. However, the really interesting thing is that the play also (seems to) threaten(s) the stability of the colony with its roots in Empire and the ideals of law, order, and justice that ostensibly underpin the Empire.
The Love of the Nightingale: As I said in reviewing Our Country's Good, I am an adaptations guy, so this play was a joy to read. I think I actually did know this was an adaptation, but I forgot until I got to the characters list. Wertenbaker takes an ancient myth and gives it a feminist spin, first with the more overt demonstration of male sexual violence as Tereus rapes Philomele and then cuts out her tongue before imprisoning her as a sex slave for five years. This is the more obvious feminist thread, but the one I find more interesting is the conscious blindness that runs throughout the play, and this comes from both men and women. There are periodically characters who say they could deliver a warning but either they don't have words to express their foreboding, or they know that those in power won't listen. When Tereus camps his ship on a desolate beach for a month while he tries to seduce Philomele, the sailors discuss repeatedly all the things they "didn't see," and on page 330, Niobe--Philomele's servant--says that she knew Philomele's fate as soon as they landed on the beach but she couldn't say anything (this couldn't feels like a cop out more than a genuine inability--Niobe never really tried to warn Philomele as far as we can see). These silences, the omissions, and these instances of refusing to see are morally reprehensible because they aid and facilitate Tereus' violence and ultimately lead to the tragic ending.
Three Birds Alighting on a Field: An interesting meditation on art, the socially constructed role of taste, the shallowness of an art market turned into a business (if indeed it ever was truly an aesthetic meritocracy), and the dreadful results of the Thatcherite era.
The Grace of Mary Traverse: This play strikes me as a kind of feminist version of Stephen Jeffreys' The Libertine. It deals with the dangers of power, the quest for knowledge, and the desire to change the world. In that sense, I suppose it doesn't immediately sound like The Libertine, but where the two plays strike me as similar is in the protagonist's quest for knowledge, and how destructive that pursuit turns out to be. But equally interesting is how little the protagonists seem to actually repent of all they lose in their quest--both make gestures of repentance, but it isn't clear (at least as I read the plays) that these are genuine or deeply felt repentances. Rochester in The Libertine converts on his deathbed, but it isn't clear that it's a sincere conversion, and Mary rejects her quest for experience after the horrific riot she is manipulated into starting, but she remains existentially discontented and convinced that there is some true experience to which she never had access.
Our Country's Good: This was the play I was most looking forward to in this collection, and it didn't disappoint. I love adaptations because they give us a chance to renegotiate with our past (in an interesting coincidence, I write this as the US is in the midst of debates on whether we should keep Confederate statues in public places, and much of that debate revolves around the question of "erasing" history or historical misremembering). Obviously history is not innocent--though the paradox is that it is not guilty either--but rather one's sense of history is determined by the position one takes. Wertenbaker here takes a position critically distant from Farquahar's light comedy The Recruiting Sergeant, when she imagines the first performance of the play in the Australian penal colony of New South Wales in the late 1790s. Here the play takes on an ambiguous message because the context demonstrates just how little innocence there was in British Imperialism, in the foundation of what would become Australia, and in the trickery utilized by British army and navy recruiters to shanghai people into service. When the play is performed in a penal colony--with its attendant attitudes dehumanizing the prisoners, of sexual violence, of brutal punishment, etc. the ethos of the British military loses much of the joviality of Farquahar's original play and comes to be seen as part of a cultural toolkit for imperialism. However, the really interesting thing is that the play also (seems to) threaten(s) the stability of the colony with its roots in Empire and the ideals of law, order, and justice that ostensibly underpin the Empire.
The Love of the Nightingale: As I said in reviewing Our Country's Good, I am an adaptations guy, so this play was a joy to read. I think I actually did know this was an adaptation, but I forgot until I got to the characters list. Wertenbaker takes an ancient myth and gives it a feminist spin, first with the more overt demonstration of male sexual violence as Tereus rapes Philomele and then cuts out her tongue before imprisoning her as a sex slave for five years. This is the more obvious feminist thread, but the one I find more interesting is the conscious blindness that runs throughout the play, and this comes from both men and women. There are periodically characters who say they could deliver a warning but either they don't have words to express their foreboding, or they know that those in power won't listen. When Tereus camps his ship on a desolate beach for a month while he tries to seduce Philomele, the sailors discuss repeatedly all the things they "didn't see," and on page 330, Niobe--Philomele's servant--says that she knew Philomele's fate as soon as they landed on the beach but she couldn't say anything (this couldn't feels like a cop out more than a genuine inability--Niobe never really tried to warn Philomele as far as we can see). These silences, the omissions, and these instances of refusing to see are morally reprehensible because they aid and facilitate Tereus' violence and ultimately lead to the tragic ending.
Three Birds Alighting on a Field: An interesting meditation on art, the socially constructed role of taste, the shallowness of an art market turned into a business (if indeed it ever was truly an aesthetic meritocracy), and the dreadful results of the Thatcherite era.
August 25, 2025
Our Country's Good is excellent and worthy of 4-5 stars in my opinion. I enjoyed The Love of the Nightingale.
I didn't enjoy the other plays as much.
I didn't enjoy the other plays as much.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews