Snoo Wilson
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Snoo Wilson (born Andrew Wilson August 2, 1948) is a writer and director.
Born in Reading, England, he began writing and directing plays as a student at the University of East Anglia in the late 1960s. In 1969, he founded the Portable Theatre with Tony Bicat and David Hare, and began to attract attention with his plays Pignight, (1971) a nightmarish fantasy about a mentally disturbed youth on a Lincolnshire pig farm who believes that pigs are about to take over the world, and Blowjob (1971), an exploration of urban violence. In 1978,The Glad Hand, in which a South African tycoon employs a troupe of actors and sails an oil tanker through the Bermuda Triangle, hoping to magically summon up the Anti-Christ and kill him in a Wild West gunfight, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and won the John Whiting Award.
A playwright with a highly individual style that has nothing to do with either realism or the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht, Wilson delights in the arcane, the occult, and the irrational, whether in the Gothic intrigues of Vampire (1973), the space aliens of Moonshine (1999), or the dueling wizards of The Number of the Beast (1982). Magic, creativity, and sexual activity are shown to be capable of releasing immense energies that can rupture the structures of the status quo, opening up new possibilities.
Wilson is noted for his ability to fuse social criticism with a surrealistic style that is highlighted with bold strokes of theatricality. In Darwin's Flood (1994), for example, Charles Darwin is visited on the eve of his death by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, his fascistic sister Elizabeth, her feckless husband Bernard, a dominatrix Mary Magdalene, and Jesus in the guise of an Irish long-distance bicyclist who quickly seduces Charles's wife, Emma. Meanwhile, a mammoth Ark breaks through the lawn of Darwin's backyard. The play becomes an affirmation of life in all its rambunctious complexity, even in the face of death.
Because of his resolutely extravagant non-realistic dramaturgy, Snoo Wilson has been relegated to the margins of the British theatrical establishment and has often been referred to as a "cult author." Yet he remains one of the most lively and thought-provoking playwrights in the contemporary theatre.
[edit] Selected Plays
1971 Pignight, Blowjob
1972 Reason, Boswell and Johnson on the Shores of the Eternal Sea
1973 Vampire
1975 The Everest Hotel
1976 The Soul of the White Ant
1978 The Glad Hand
1979 Flaming Bodies
1983 Our Lord of Lynchville, Loving Reno
1987 More Light
1994 Darwin's Flood
1998 Sabina
1999 Moonshine
[edit] References
- James Bierman, "Enfant Terrible of the English Stage." Modern Drama. v. 24 (Dec. 1981): 424-435.
- Dawn Dietrich, "Snoo Wilson." In British Playwrights, 1956-. Ed. William W. Demastes. Greenwood Press, 1996. ISBN 0-313-28759-7.
