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Snoo Wilson: Enfant Terrible of the English Stage JAMES BIERMAN Winning a coveted Bicentennial Fellowship to the United States in 1980 confinned Snoo Wilson's election to the ranks of England's most "promising" playwrights. He found himself following in the footsteps of other recipients of the award, such as David Edgar, who were then "promising" and are now enonnously successful. What preceded Snoo to California was a reputation for wildness. I asked him how he regarded that reputation. It's better than no reputation at all, but it's very distressing. I think of myself as agentle poet ofsurrealism, and it turns out that people think ofme as bringing bucketsoffilth and excrement on stage. I suppose I shall have to spend a lifetime refuting them. I Other than by reputation, Snoo is less known in America than most of the English dramatists of his generation - particularly his fellow playwrights from Portable Theatre, Howard Brenton and David Hare. The Everest Hotel, The Beast, and Vampire have had small productions in New York, and the laoer was also staged in Seattle. In general, the exposure of Snoo's work abroad has not matched his success in England. He is known to a certain extent in Australia; there has been a Gennan translation of The Soul ofthe White Ant; and Blowjob was produced successfully in Sweden. But such spotty exposure provides only a hint of the volume, range and diversity of his work. Although only thirty-two years old, Snoo has been enonnously productive, as a list of his plays (thirty-four including one in progress) indicates.' The vast majority ofhis plays have found productions, often by such prestigious theatre companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, and he has become known in England as one of its major young dramatists. Given Snoo's interest in cult behavior in his work, it seems ironic that Time Out critic Steve Grant would have asserted that "his reputation has increasingly taken on the dimensions of a minor cult."3 Snoo Wilson: Enfant Terrible There are people who quite like to see my work, but I would have thought that if it were genuine truth then there would be little temples or theatres devoted to putting the plays on. But I've yet to see another production of The Glad Hand, although Bernard Levin, I hear, has been privately championing a revival. Regardless of the cult analogy, a Snoo Wilson play sports a major, though maverick, brand name, and theatres are willing to commission them frequently enough for Snoo to do almost all of his plays on commission. I write for commission because I'm always afraid of my work being run from here to there, and the idea of writing in a vacuum, I find uninviting. And I usually need the money. The desire to be desired and the need for the money go hand in hand. Also, it means that you're writing for a specific theatre and you can imagine the incident, the people and the stage. I seem to have an unfortunate history of writing a play for a theatre and, as it were, developing a relationship with them, and ata certain stage, their idealism about the play and the project collapses, and I find a theatre will accept it twelve doors down. I'm always looking for a platfonn. I get very depressed by the kind of limbo which Salvation Now is in, and The Glad Hand took me four years to finish, and it was a very depressing thing that it was shipped around endlessly. It was orginally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Commissions enable young playwrights to make a living at a trade which would probably not support them in the United States. There are people who actually do it with money from BBC and from subsidized small theatres which provide payments for a new play. So there is actually an active subsidy system which provides small amounts of money which dribble down to the people who are at the front line. Although I'm frequently frightened of not eaming enough money, I'm not entirely destitute because there are the small theatres...

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