Consistent in all of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s writing has been a problematisation of the global politics of identity, a problematising marked by characters - from ex-expatriates to middle-class professionals - struggling through a crisis of identity. She offers on-stage a view of late twentieth-century 'Great' Britain in which she examines the multiple and conflicting subjectivities of the world and brings to life the various 'others' created by hierarchies of gender, race, and nation. In her 1990s play, The Break of Day, Mihail, a disenfranchised Eastern European trying to strategise his way out of communism to capitalism, places his hope in what he calls 'cross-border children', children who 'will be wilfully international, part of a great European community'. Broadly conceived, such cross-border children - with their multiple cultural heritages, their welcoming of fluid identity, and their consciousness of both future and past - are at the heart of Wertenbaker’s drama. In her varied plays, she examines the problems and triumphs of living in a world of porous cultures and shifting identities.

I would like to explore the powerful energies of Wertenbaker’s plays with a focus on two issues. First I will detail her attention to language, a focus most obvious in her characters' self-consciousness about words; Wertenbaker’s own self-consciousness is clear in her building of intertextual relations between her plays and other texts, and in her sensitivity to the conscriptions of language by those persons or institutions with power.