6 April 1986
WHEN Timberlake Wertenbaker, winner of the Plays and Players
award for the most Promising New Playwright of 1985, was asked by the RSC
to translate Ariane Mnouchkine's Mephisto, she nearly turned it down because she
was at the delicate early stages of writing a new play of her own. But Mephisto
so impressed her that she temporarily abandoned her own writing to ensure
that the tone and meaning of the French text were faithfully conveyed to
an English audience.
A translation. she believes should be exact, not deviating
in meaning from the original. It should never become the product of two
writers. Mephisto feels as if it belongs to her, but only insofar
as the English is hers. She enjoys the challenge of translating for its
precision and discipline: "It's not simply a matter of substituting
one word for another. When you write your natural language you differentiate
people by rhythms of speech. The most difficult thing is to find rhythmsthat
correspond." She won't translate plays she doesn't admire although
occasionally during the process of translation she's become disillusioned
by a play, through discovering a playwright's tricks.
Translating Mephisto, however, has been an illuminating
experience. The play, which opened at the Barbican
last week, is based on Klaus Mann's novel and shows the changing lives of
a group of actors in Germany at the time of Hitler's rise to power. Because
Wertenbaker shares Mnouchkine's belief in a challenging theatre that should
awaken its audience to the conditions of their existence, she sees the play
as a warning to countries moving, politically, to the right. Timberlake--a
family surname turned first name which, she says, tends to put critics off
her work because they think' it an anagram--Wertenbaker grew up in the French
Basque country. She refuses to reveal her age and believes personal details
to be irrelevant and unimportant, but she did explain that, six years ago,
when teaching English and French in Greece, she formed a small fringe company
and started writing plays for Greek children. When she came to England,
she sent the plays around and the Soho Poly was so impressed that it commissioned
Case to Answer in 1980.
After her work for the Soho Poly, she wrote for the Women's
Theatre Group and Shared Experience. In 1983 she wrote Abel's Sister
which was performed at the Royal
Court and went on to become their resident writer. Having always worked
in isolation, this was valuable experience as she found herself suddenly
at the centre of a theatre, able to participate and learn about the mechanics
of producing a play.
Writing for the RSC has been very different, largely
because, as a company, it commands far greater resources. "Money makes
all the difference", she says, "it can make a play work for you."
But she would like to think that, like Mephisto
where the modern day parallels are apparent only if you wish to see them,
her plays contain no dogma. Rather they pose questions, all related to the
one central question she finds impossible to answer--"Why is the world
in the hopeless state it is and what can we do to change it?"