Free Speech – Jill Szoo Wilson

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s dramaturgy resists the illusion that history presents itself as stable, inherited, or complete, unfolding instead across her plays as a contested field of voices, omissions, and revisions in which narration becomes inseparable from the structures of power that determine who may speak and how meaning takes shape over time.

Where Harold Pinter locates meaning in silence, allowing absence to carry emotional and psychological weight, Wertenbaker locates it within narration itself, in the act of telling and retelling, so that her theatre turns toward the question of authorship. Wertenbaker often asks who is permitted to say what happened and under what conditions that permission is granted.

In Our Country’s Good, the stage becomes a site of layered authorship in which historical reality, imposed cultural structure, and emergent subjectivity exist simultaneously. A group of transported convicts, situated within a British penal colony in Australia, rehearse and ultimately perform The Recruiting Officer (the play within the play), a text written in another century, under another regime, and for another audience. The story enters this new context as both an instrument of discipline and a potential tool of transformation.

The theatrical event, as Wertenbaker constructs it, unfolds across these overlapping frames, and the language the convicts are asked to speak carries the imprint of authority, shaped in advance by a system that has positioned them as subjects rather than speakers. In the process of rehearsal, that condition begins to shift, as the repetition of borrowed lines gives way to a more unstable and revealing dynamic in which language, though still external, becomes something that can be inhabited.

The tension of the play resides within this movement between recitation and recognition, where the act of speaking becomes a negotiation with the terms under which speech is made available. Within this structure, Liz Morden’s trajectory acquires its force as her initial refusal to speak in her own defense gives way, later in the play, to a performance of startling clarity and precision. This shift unfolds as an acquisition of voice within a system that has persistently denied her access to it.

What changes in this moment extends beyond interior feeling and into her relationship to language itself. At the beginning of the play, that language circulates around her as accusation and judgment, forming a structure in which she holds no standing, so that her silence registers as the visible consequence of exclusion.

When she takes on the language of The Recruiting Officer, the shift occurs with precision, as the words present themselves as structure, held, tested, and measured, allowing the audience to perceive their continued externality even within the act of speaking, where a reorganization begins to take place and repetition starts to function as access.

The moment derives its power from its lack of resolution. Liz occupies language provisionally, aware of its instability and its dependence upon the conditions that permit its use. Wertenbaker presents voice as something granted, shaped, and always subject to withdrawal, and the theatre becomes a space that exposes the conditions under which speech becomes possible.

Wertenbaker’s use of doubling intensifies this instability, as actors move between the roles of convicts and the characters within Farquhar’s play, collapsing distinctions between past and present, fiction and history in a way that complicates identity and requires the audience to hold multiple realities at once while witnessing how narrative is constructed, borrowed, and reframed. Through this structure, authorship reveals its dependence upon prior language, as no voice emerges in isolation and each articulation carries the imprint of what has preceded it, reinforcing the play’s central concern with the contingent nature of speech.

This concern with narrative authority deepens in The Love of the Nightingale, where Wertenbaker turns to the myth of Philomela, approaching it as a structure to be interrogated rather than preserved, within which the violence at the center of the narrative—Tereus’s assault and Philomela’s subsequent mutilation—renders the relationship between language and power brutally visible, as the removal of speech becomes literal and embodied. Within this framework, voice emerges as something that can be stripped away at the level of the body itself. Wertenbaker extends the narrative beyond that moment of rupture by introducing, through Philomele’s act of weaving her story into a tapestry, an alternative form of authorship in which image and texture assume narrative function and meaning persists within the conditions that attempt its erasure.

Procne’s position further complicates the structure of knowledge and control, as her status as both sister and queen situates her within a system of partial authority, while her understanding of events unfolds through fragments shaped by what is disclosed and what remains concealed. The emergence of truth takes the form of reconstruction rather than revelation, requiring assembly, interpretation, and response. Meaning accumulates through time, shaped by the pressures of concealment and disclosure, reinforcing Wertenbaker’s broader exploration of how narrative authority operates under constraint.

In After Darwin, the instability of voice takes on a distinctly intellectual form, as Wertenbaker shifts from the contested terrain of history and myth into the equally fraught domain of scientific authorship, where the question concerns how knowledge is produced, circulated, and revised across time. By situating Charles Darwin within an ongoing field of discourse, rather than presenting him as a singular origin point, the play reveals the extent to which even foundational ideas depend upon their reception, as each articulation of Darwin’s theory encounters response, reinterpretation, and gradual transformation through use.

This process becomes legible within the exchanges where Darwin’s language, often treated as definitive, begins to shift under the pressure of those who engage with it, so that what initially presents itself as explanation gradually registers as argument, and what carries the weight of discovery acquires a provisional quality, contingent upon the listener, the context, and the moment of its reception. Wertenbaker allows authority to disperse across the voices that surround it, revealing that knowledge emerges through sustained interaction, as statements gain or lose stability depending on how they are taken up, challenged, or extended.

The structure of the play mirrors the process it describes, as language undergoes a form of theatrical evolution shaped by variation, response, and adaptation, so that ideas, once articulated, shift in meaning as they pass between speakers. In this way, authorship relocates from the origin of the idea to its ongoing negotiation, revealing that what we recognize as knowledge depends upon the conditions under which it circulates.

Across these plays, Wertenbaker constructs a theatre of inquiry in which characters navigate systems of language that both constrain and enable them, and where meaning emerges through negotiation, so that voice remains contingent, shaped by the structures that permit or deny its expression.

If Wertenbaker’s theatre is structured around the instability of voice, then the actor’s task extends beyond the revelation of character into the precise tracking of how character forms through language, as speech is acquired, borrowed, resisted, or withheld within conditions that precede and shape the self.

Acting Wertenbaker: Language, Authorship, and the Performed Self

To perform Timberlake Wertenbaker is to enter a dramaturgical field in which character and language remain inseparable, requiring the actor to sustain psychological truth while attending to the shifting conditions through which that truth becomes expressible, so that identity emerges through speech. In Our Country’s Good, the actor must hold simultaneously the position of the convict and the role the convict learns to play, not as a static doubling but as an ongoing negotiation in which the language of The Recruiting Officer resists immediate ease in the body and must be tested, repeated, and gradually brought into use.

A Meisner-based approach grounds this process in truthful response, as the actor begins with the difficulty of speaking the text, allowing friction to remain present in rehearsal so that the formality or distance of the language becomes playable, shaping the rhythm of interaction and gradually shifting, through repetition, from imitation toward use, until the moment at which the language begins to land on the partner and the scene acquires immediacy. From a Uta Hagen perspective, the actor locates the stakes within the act of speaking itself, asking what it means to articulate words that determine one’s standing within a system, so that the objective centers on securing footing, maintaining presence, and holding position, with language functioning as the instrument through which that effort is enacted.

Liz Morden’s trajectory sharpens this problem, as her early silence operates as active engagement structured through attention, registration, and withholding. When she speaks, the actor sustains containment, allowing each word to carry weight through its placement, as the objective remains fixed on claiming space within a system that governs access and produces language that feels earned through its relation to circumstance.

In The Love of the Nightingale, the removal of speech reorganizes technique, requiring the actor to shift toward physical action, where response continues through attention to partner and environment and where intention becomes legible through gesture and stillness grounded in specific, repeatable actions. In After Darwin, the actor navigates intellectual language through objective-driven action, ensuring that each idea operates as an attempt to persuade, challenge, or defend, so that thought registers as behavior within the scene.

Across Wertenbaker’s plays, the actor tracks shifts in language as they move between borrowed, discovered, and withheld forms, with each state registering physically through changes in timing, breath, and relational focus, allowing the audience to perceive the conditions under which speech occurs. Wertenbaker’s dramaturgy presents the self as something formed, challenged, and revised through these conditions, so that performance becomes an act of sustained attention to the interplay between language and power.

Where Harold Pinter’s silences create space for what remains unspoken, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s structures reveal the mechanisms that determine who speaks, directing attention toward the conditions that make speech possible; in doing so, her dramaturgy extends theatre’s capacity to render visible the processes through which meaning, identity, and authority emerge.

By Jill Szoo Wilson

At least once a semester in communication class, I bring up the name of a famous actor or actress from the 1990s, and the students have no idea who I’m talking about. I register my surprise, make a big deal about how they don’t know anything about the world, and then show them a clip from a movie featuring said actor or actress.

This is boots meeting the ground in education.

Last semester, the name that eluded them was Meg Ryan. Fortunately, when I showed them a scene from When Harry Met Sally, two of the students recognized her. It is also important to note that most of them had not seen the movie, and when one of them asked who the short guy in the scene was, I had a second reason to faint in despair.

Let us pause in remembrance of decades past.

Moments like this have become familiar. Each year introduces a slightly different horizon of reference, and a shifting boundary between what is assumed knowledge and what has already passed out of view.

Most of the time, these gaps remain at the level of shared culture. A film, a music reference, or a name that no longer carries immediate recognition. The loss is noticeable, though in all honesty, it rarely feels truly consequential.

This week, the gap carried a different kind of weight.

I mentioned the name Jordan Peterson, and again, the room was silent. No recognition. No point of entry.

To close the gap, I had to do more than show a clip.

Peterson’s work engages questions about the conditions of thought itself, particularly the role of language in shaping what can be known, examined, and understood. Across lectures, interviews, and public debates, he has returned repeatedly to a claim that carries significant implications for how human beings think and speak. People do not first arrive at a fully formed thought and then express it. Instead, we speak in order to find out what we think, and in doing so, begin to understand what we are actually trying to say.

Using this framework, speech is not only a means of delivering a finished idea. It becomes the place where the idea is formed. Most people are not walking around with fully developed positions waiting to be expressed, although social media can create that impression. Most honest people are working their ideas out as they go. They try something in language, hear it, adjust it, run into a contradiction they did not expect, and sometimes arrive somewhere they did not plan to go at all. Peterson himself often spoke this way in lectures, beginning with a premise and working through it in real time. That is a brave act to perform in front of a thousand people on some random Tuesday.

Peterson’s claim situates speech within a longer intellectual tradition. Lev Vygotsky described thought as developing through social interaction, with language serving as the primary tool through which internal reasoning takes shape. Ludwig Wittgenstein located meaning within use, suggesting that the limits of language and the limits of thought remain closely intertwined. Within this framework, speech operates as one of the conditions through which thinking becomes possible.

When considered in this light, the question of free speech acquires a different kind of weight. The issue extends beyond the circulation of opinions or the management of public discourse. It reaches into the conditions that allow thought itself to emerge.

In the classroom, this becomes visible in small, subtle ways. A student hesitates before raising her hand because she’s not sure how something will land. A comment is softened, or abandoned altogether, because it might be taken the wrong way. A question goes unasked because it feels easier to stay quiet than to risk being misunderstood. None of these moments appear particularly dramatic, though each one narrows the space in which thought can be worked out in real time. It removes the moment where a person hears themselves clearly enough to recognize that something does not hold… or that it does.

Whatever thoughts are constrained in the room do not disappear. The student conceals them and at times carries them elsewhere to test in a more sympathetic environment, where agreement is more likely.

When speech does not disappear but simply moves out of view, it changes shape. Without response or resistance from the real-life community, ideas tend to harden. What might have been clarified in the open becomes more certain in private. For example, a student writes something in a discussion board they know will not be challenged, and it stays exactly as it is. The same idea, spoken out loud in a room, would have met a question, a pause, a raised eyebrow, something to press against. Without that, it holds.

Some amount of friction is part of how thinking happens. It gives ideas something to meet, something that reveals both their limits and their strength.

To think with any depth means holding two competing ideas at once without reducing either one into something easier to dismiss. Something that can stand on its own. It means articulating a position you do not agree with well enough that someone who does would recognize it. It means resisting the urge to resolve the tension too early. That kind of thinking is slower. It asks for precision. It asks for attention. And it asks for restraint, the willingness to let both ideas remain intact long enough to actually see them.

That work depends on language. It depends on the ability to say something before it is complete, to hear it, and to revise it.

What takes place in a classroom extends into the wider structure of public life. The same dynamics appear at a larger scale, where the pressures shaping speech influence the development of thought across entire communities. When speech narrows, whether through formal restriction or informal pressure, the range of what can be articulated begins to contract. Thought continues, though along more limited paths. Some ideas remain unspoken. Others circulate without meaningful challenge. Over time, this reshaping of discourse influences what can be examined, questioned, and understood.

Peterson’s insistence on the role of speech in thought formation places him within this broader conversation. His position has generated controversy in part because it resists attempts to separate language from its cognitive and social functions. To speak carries risk. It opens a person to misunderstanding, critique, and revision, and places a developing thought into contact with other minds. That contact is where refinement becomes possible.

The stakes of this position become clearer when viewed through the environments in which thinking occurs. A classroom, a conversation, or a public forum. Each serves as a site in which language mediates the development of ideas. The freedom to speak within these spaces does not guarantee clarity or truth. It establishes the conditions under which both can be pursued.

What began as a question about who students recognize in a classroom unfolded into a larger inquiry about how knowledge is formed. Cultural memory shifts. Names recede. New figures emerge. Beneath these changes, the underlying process remains consistent. Thought develops through articulation, through response, and through the sustained interaction between language and understanding.

Within that process, speech holds a central place. It allows a person to hear what they are saying closely enough to recognize where it holds and where it begins to shift.

In the end, the question of free speech returns to something simple. It has to do with whether there is still room to say something before it is finished, and to let it change in the presence of other people.

Tag: Free Speech

Free Speech and the Right to Think