Timberlake Wertenbaker Selected Works

In the near future a group of women gather in a half built hotel on Winter Hill in Bolton; is it a book group discussing famous heroines? Is it a chance to meet with friends and drink wine? Or is it...a revolution?

Winter Hill centers on a group of eight local women as they deal with the ramifications of land on nearby Winter Hill being sold to developers to create a luxurious skyscraper hotel – the largest in Europe. To appease the local community, they are promised by developers that a new school and social housing will also be built on the hill. However, as the money begins to run out, these plans are scrapped leading to the group meeting up in the half-built hotel to discuss what, if anything, can be done about it and if power can ever truly belong to the people.

Telemachus' father left long ago to fight a war. Telemachus doesn't remember him. Now the man of the house, he must step up to defend his father's legacy and protect his mother from the suitors that lounge around the court. Meanwhile, the great Odysseus has been trapped by the goddess Kalypso for ten long years. Lost in his memories of past glories, he longs to return home.

This timeless Greek myth has been reinvented by playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker to create a modern, rich and powerful new work about a son searching for his father and a father searching for himself that is, at the same time, an exploration of masculinity and the effects of war. A play for young audiences and their families.

In 1215, when the King of England abuses his extraordinary power, the barons’ take action. In 2015, when the kings of global business and finance abuse their extraordinary power, who will take action and what will confrontation look like? In the decades that follow, what will remain of the values we hold most dear? A gripping drama about the consequences of confronting power on a global scale.

Performed along with short plays by Howard Brenton, Anders Lustgarten, and Sally Woodcock as The Magna Carta Plays.

America, 1776.

Christian is a Quaker. His family came to America to live in peace, but he is a young man fired up by dreams of revolution. Should he defy his community and pick up a gun? Thomas Jefferson is an idealist, with a vision of liberty for all, but America is a fractured coalition of states in a bloody war for independence. How will he balance the ideal with the reality? Susanna was born a slave, but the British promise to liberate any slave who joins their fight against the revolution. Where does true freedom lie?

A major new translation of a trilogy of Sophocles' plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991. Includes Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus At Colonus, and Antigone.

Torn between army politics and the love of his soldiers on the front line, a legendary leader spirals out of control. Inspired by Sophocles' classical play, Our Ajax draws on interviews with contemporary servicemen and women to create a modern epic of heroism, love and homeland.

Jean Racine's classic play Britannicus is a chilling study of the emergence of a monster, as Emperor Nero begins to take Rome in his grip. A new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker.

A mysterious investor has set his sights on a prime piece of Greek real estate. Owned by two sisters whose lives and beliefs are at odds, and with debts rising all the time, the property's future is uncertain. In a Greek tragedy, everybody loses. Through the struggle between two very different sisters for control of their family home, Timberlake Wertenbaker's new play explores why we are willing to let the home of art and democracy crumble as the rest of Europe looks on.

The range of Pierre Marivaux's work and the subtlety beneath its apparent frivolity are demonstrated here by two of his most famous plays: Les Fausses Confidences (False Admissions) and L'Heureux Stratageme (Successful Strategies). Love is the subject of both plays, with underlying themes of deceit and self-delusion. The former play deals with social mobility and the power of money, while the latter, lighter in tone, takes place on a country estate with a cast of aristocrats and their servants. Both plays had their British premiere in this translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith in 1983.

Five-scene drama involving courting couples in various stages of life. The scene entitled "Summer" rewrites the wooing scene of Shakespeare's Henry V.