Snoo Wilson
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Snoo Wilson (born Andrew James Wilson August 2, 1948) is a dramatist and theater director.
Born in Reading, England, he began writing and directing plays as a student at the University of East Anglia (form which he graduated second of the class in American and English Literature) in the late 1960s. He was one of the students of Lorna Sage. In 1969, he founded the Portable Theatre with Tony Bicat and David Hare.
Wilson began to attract attention with his plays Pignight, (1971) a nightmarish fantasy about a mentally disturbed WW II soldier, who while on a Lincolnshire pig farm, believes that pigs are about to take over the world, and Blowjob (1971), an exploration of urban violence during which a quantity of raw meat was thrown on stage to simulate the corpse of an Alsatian dog which had just been blown up - the title was a pun on this event. 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.
Wilson also created stage designs for some of the plays he directed.
Snoo Wilson lives in London, with his family (Ann McFerran, who is an investigative journalist, and their three children).
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[edit] Selected Plays
- 1972 - Boswell and Johnson on the Shores of the Eternal Sea
- 1973 - Preston Lackey
- 1975 - The Rickmeister
- 1976 - Blowjobbers
- 1978 - The Glad Hand
- 1979 - Flaming Bodies
- 1982 - The Josh Machine of All Beasts
- 1983 - Our Lord of Lynchville, Loving Reno
- 1987 - More Light (play about Giordano Bruno)
- 1994 - HRH (dealt with the Duke of Windsor's life in Bermuda and examined his possible role in a suggested cover-up following the murder of multi-millionaire Harry Oakes in 1943)
- 1998 - Sabina (play about Sabina Spielrein, fist female psychoanalyst)
- 1999 - Moonshine
- 2003 - Love Song of the Electric Bear (play about British mathematician Alan Turing
[edit] Novels
- Space Ache, (title of German translation-Raum-Weh)
- I, Crowley
- Melmont
[edit] Screeplays for Movies
- Shadey
- The Silent Touch, directed by Krzysztof Zanussi
- Eichman (with Thomas Kretschmann as Eichmann).
[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.
