Private Passions

Timberlake Wertenbaker is one of our leading playwrights, adapters and translators. Her parents were American, but she was brought up in Basque country in France and has spent much of her life in Greece. Not surprising, then, that her major theme is exile, displacement, flight. She's best known for her play about convicts in 18th century Australia, "Our Country's Good", which was first staged in the late 1980s and which was revived recently at the National Theatre. It has become a set text in schools, and in fact Wertenbaker's own daughter had to study it (refusing all help from her playwright mother).Timberlake Wertenbaker is well known to Radio 4 listeners as the adapter of the recent "War and Peace"; and her new work is a dramatization of "My Brilliant Friend" by the cult Italian writer Elena Ferrante, which will be broadcast as the Classic Serial on 31 July.In Private Passions, Timberlake Wertenbaker talks about her childhood in Basque country, and how that sense of being part of a political minority has