Snoo Wilson
Andrew James Wilson (born 2 August 1948), better known as Snoo Wilson, is an English playwright, screenwriter and director. His early plays such as Blow-Job (1971) were overtly political, often combining harsh social comment with comedy. In his later works he has moved away from purely political themes, embracing a range of surrealist, magical, philosophical and comic subjects.
After studying literature at the University of East Anglia, Wilson began his writing career in 1969. He began to build his reputation with a series of plays and screenplays in the early 1970s and served as dramaturge to the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1978, his surrealist play The Glad Hand attracted favourable notice, as did his 1994 play, Darwin's Flood. He also wrote several novels and held teaching positions.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
Wilson was born in Reading, England, the son of two teachers: Leslie Wilson and his wife Pamela Mary née Boyle.[1] He was educated at Bradfield College and the University of East Anglia (UEA), graduating with a degree in American and English Literature in 1969.[2] At UEA, he was one of the students of Lorna Sage.[3] Wilson's early plays, the one-act Girl Mas as Pigs and the two-act Ella Daybellfesse's Machine, were first produced at UEA in, respectively, June and November 1967.[1] Two years later, a second one-act play, Between the Acts, was first produced in Canterbury, at the University of Kent.[1]
In 1969, Wilson embarked on a writing career.[1] Together with Tony Bicat and David Hare, Wilson founded the Portable Theatre Company (Brighton and London) and was its associate director from 1970 to 1975.[1] His plays from these years included four one-act works, Charles the Martyr (1970), Device of Angels (1970), Pericles, The Mean Knight (1970) and Reason (1972), most of which dealt with overtly political subjects.[1]
[edit] 1970s
Wilson's first full-length works to attract notice were Pignight and Blow-Job, both produced in 1971. Pignight, the first of his own plays that Wilson directed, is a nightmarish fantasy about a mentally disturbed soldier, who, while on a Lincolnshire pig farm, believes that pigs are about to take over the world.[4] The play was described by the critic Michael Billington as a "savage and disenchanted portrait of rural life".[5] Blow-Job is a political exploration of urban violence during which a quantity of raw meat is thrown on stage to simulate the corpse of an Alsatian dog that has just been blown up.[6] With some reservations, Irving Wardle praised the piece in The Times for its "authentic sense of horror … its intermingling of physical outrage and savage farce."[7]
In Wilson's 1973 full-length play, The Pleasure Principle, comedy, politics and social comment were again combined, but to less savage effect. Billington wrote, "On the one hand it is a strenuous indictment of ownership, property, greed and personal exploitation: on the other, it is a madhouse extravaganza that operates on the good old comic principle of always putting a bomb under the audience's expectations."[8] In The Observer, Robert Cushman wrote, "This is one of the best plays of the seventies' heartless school; Coward's Design for Living is a fount of charity by comparison."[9] Other full-length plays of this period were Vampire (1973) and The Beast (1974). Wilson's screenplays and teleplays included Sunday for Seven Days (1971), The Good Life (1971), More About the Universe (1972), Swamp Music (1973), The Barium Meal (1974), The Trip to Jerusalem (1974), Don't Make Waves (1975), and A Greenish Man (1979).[1] In 1975 and 1976, Wilson was dramaturge to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). In 1976 he married the journalist Ann McFerran, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.[2] In the same year, he became script editor of the BBC television anthology drama series, Play for Today.[1]
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 conjure up the Anti-Christ and kill him in a Wild West gunfight, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and won the John Whiting Award. Cushman wrote, "Sceptics like me have sometimes fallen foul of Mr Wilson's concern with the occult; here he makes it easy for us. Like Tom Stoppard he sets up impossible situations and explains them; and his wit in this piece has a Stoppardian exhilaration."[10] Later that year, Wilson was appointed Henfield Fellow at the University of East Anglia.[2]
[edit] Later work
Wilson's style has grown away from the overtly political manner of his contemporaries David Hare and Howard Brenton,[11] and he often writes about the arcane, the occult, and the irrational, whether in the Gothic intrigues of Vampire (1973), the space aliens of Moonshine (1999), or the duelling wizards of The Number of the Beast (1982).[12] Commenting on his interest in magical subjects, Wilson said, "It's only because people like to think that the material world is at base solid that they have to think of magic as a separate category of events. … The stage is very near magic in what it does and it's also composed of finally the same thing, which is sort of people and tinsel, which is all magic really is."[13] On another occasion, Wilson commented, "I prefer to write for theatre because it can create the oldest magic. The question of its relevance is only asked by passive incredulous individuals who cannot swallow the idea that perception is an act."[1]
Wilson has often sought to fuse social criticism with a surrealistic, comic, style. He said in 1978, "I think, well, you have to laugh, don't you? With all the dreadful, dreadful things going on I think of that as my way of keeping a grasp on my own sensibilities. In fact, it's the only way I have."[11] In Darwin's Flood (1994), Charles Darwin is visited on the eve of his death by his fascistic sister Elizabeth, her feckless husband Bernard, a dominatrix Mary Magdalene, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jesus in the guise of an Irish long-distance bicyclist who quickly seduces Darwin's wife, Emma. Meanwhile, a mammoth Ark breaks through the lawn of Darwin's backyard.[14] The director, Simon Stokes, commented that there is a serious message behind such extravagances: "In a very humorous way the play is also asking: What if God does exist, and put the fossils in the rocks? What if he did plant the evidence?"[15]
A departure from Wilson's usual theatrical genres was in 1986, when he wrote a new libretto for Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld for the English National Opera. The reviews concentrated on the décor by Gerald Scarfe and the production by David Pountney, both of which strongly divided opinion; Wilson's work escaped the sharp censure directed at his colleagues, and his device of turning the bossy character "Public Opinion" into a parody of the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was favourably remarked upon.[16]
Wilson's later academic posts have included those of US Bicentennial Fellow in Playwriting (1981–82) and Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of California at San Diego (1987).[2] Of his non-theatre works, his 1984 novel, Spaceache, was described by Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer as "a dystopian fantasy of a grim and ruthless high-technology low-competence future".[17] John Melmoth, the reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement, wrote that Wilson scored in his "nearness to the knuckle … a quirky, unpleasant and emetic sense of humour."[18]
[edit] Works
[edit] Selected plays
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[edit] Selected screenplays, TV and radio
[edit] Novels
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[edit] Notes
- ^ a b c d e f g h i "Snoo Wilson", Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2006, accessed 30 November 2011 (subscription required)
- ^ a b c d "Wilson, Snoo", Who's Who 2011, A & C Black, 2011; online edition, Oxford University Press, December 2010, accessed 29 November 2011 (subscription required)
- ^ Bennett, Catherine. "A life up in smoke", guardian.co.uk, 18 January 2001, accessed November 30, 2011
- ^ "Portable Pigs", The Guardian, 16 February 1971, p. 8
- ^ Billington, Michael. "Pignight – Young Vic," The Times, 5 March 1971, p. 9
- ^ De Jongh, Nicholas. "The Deep End of the Pool", The Guardian, 7 September 1971, p. 8
- ^ Wardle, Irving. "Blow-Job – King's Head", The Times, 11 November 1971, p. 12
- ^ Billington, Michael. "Pleasure Principle", The Guardian, 27 November 1973, p. 14
- ^ Cushman, Robert. "End of a Genius", The Observer, 2 December 1973, p. 33
- ^ Cushman, Robert. "Aboard the good ship Snoo", The Observer, 21 May 1978, p. 15
- ^ a b Chaillet, Ned. "The unpredictable Snoo Wilson", The Times, 10 May 1978, p. 14
- ^ Wardle, Irving. "The Number of the Beast", The Times, 11 February 1982, p. 15
- ^ "Briefing", The Observer, 10 November 1974, p. 29
- ^ O'Mahony, John. "Snoo's ark lands", The Observer, 1 May 1994, p. C7; and Billington, Michael, "Short on theory", The Guardian, 10 May 1994, p. A7
- ^ O'Mahony, John. "Snoo's ark lands", The Observer, 1 May 1994, p. C7
- ^ Griffiths, Paul. "Flamboyant underworld of a cartoonist's vision – Orpheus in the Underworld", The Times, 11 September 1985, p. 15; and Heyworth, Peter. "Orpheus in the Undergrowth, The Observer, 15 September 1985, p. 21
- ^ Drabble, Margaret and Jenny Stringer. "Wilson, Snoo", The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature,Oxford University Press, 2007, Oxford Reference Online, accessed 29 November 2011 (subscription required)
- ^ Melmoth, John. "A nice class of enemy", The Times Literary Supplement, 16 March 1984, p. 267
- ^ Jury, Louise. "How We Met; Simon Callow and Snoo Wilson", The Independent, 5 October 1997
[edit] Further reading
- Bierman, James. "Enfant Terrible of the English Stage." Modern Drama. v. 24 (Dec. 1981): 424-435.
- Coe, Ada. "From Surrealism to Snoorealism: the Theatre of Snoo Wilson", New Theatre Quarterly 5.17 (1989): 73.
- Dietrich, Dawn. "Snoo Wilson." In British Playwrights, 1956-. Ed. William W. Demastes. Greenwood Press, 1996. ISBN 0-313-28759-7.
- Wilson, Snoo. Snoo Wilson: Plays. 1. London: Methuen Drama, 1999.
