1. Foreword to Flaming Bodies (1979). Compare Pooh-Bah (‘I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmic primordial atomic globule’) or alternatively Jung's concept of ‘racial memory’ and of ‘myth’. Wilson's theatre is intensely visual, but at the same time his allusions proliferate and explode in all directions, and one of the delights in studying his plays lies in trying to track them down. On principle, if a phrase or an image seems to suggest an allusion, then this suggestion is probably well-founded. Snoo Wilson's ‘allusive’ style, in fact, may be seen as an essential element in the strange mixture of realism and fantasy which he presents.

2. , Aristophanes, The frogs, trans. Lattimore, Richmond (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 23Google Scholar. No stage directions from Aristophanes have survived, but there is a reasonable amount of internal evidence concerning stage presentation in the texts of the plays themselves. I have therefore utilised the Lattimore gloss.

3. The paradox here lies in the fact that, outside the domain of the visual arts, English critics as a whole have tended to treat the term surrealism with the same ‘condescending nod towards amusements which do not engage the heart and mind, that are, somehow, not to do with them’, that Wilson objects to elsewhere in connection with the word ‘zany’ (Afterword to The Glad Hand, p. 58). Yet surrealism was a serious movement dealing with a disturbing, even frightening vision of a fragmented world. When Eugène lonesco insisted that he was not a surrealist, this was not because he believed surrealism to be frivolous (he did not), but because he felt that, in their pursuit of the subconscious dreams and nightmares where deeper reality lay, the surrealists failed to impose the discipline and control over form which certain genres, such as the theatre, required. This control, quite clearly, is apparent in Snoo Wilson's plays.

4. For example, see Salvador Dali's ‘La Girafe en feu’ or ‘L'Ane pourri’, Pablo Picasso's ‘Minotaur’ series, René Magritte's ‘Le Thérapeute’ or “Le Domaine enchanté”, Joan Mirò's ‘Terre labourée’ (a visual-surrealist echo of Animal Farm), George Malkine's ‘La Seconde vue’, Félix Labissé's ‘Médusine’, etc. In particular, Svanberg's, Max-Walter ‘Hommage de constellations étranges à G. en dix phases’ (1964)Google Scholar proposes the image of Goya's naked ‘La Maya’ sexually engaged with the swan's-neck/penis in precisely the same way as Snoo Wilson engages his Gale in Act Three of The Pleasure Principle.

5. One of the many topical (but extremely oblique) references which may be encountered throughout Snoo Wilson's dramatic writing. Britain was finally admitted into the Common Market (the EEC) in January 1973.

6. If Snoo Wilson objects to the critics' use of the term ‘zany’ to describe his drama (see above, note 3), it is still equally remarkable that the term ‘absurdist’ would seem very rarely to have been applied to describe his work. Obviously, the critics feel the need to dissociate him from Adamov, Ionesco, Pinter, et al. The problem is to try and understand why this should be so.

7. The Gland Hand, p. 14.

8. Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. Hubback, C. J. M. (London: International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Ibid., p. 4.

10. The Soul of the White Anl was first given in February 1976, at a time when the English press was just beginning its build-up to the Jubilee Year of 1977, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of a reign which had seen the virtual dismemberment of the British Empire. Snoo Wilson, as we have seen already, is never averse to immediate topicality. I would note that, in this essay, I am quite deliberately not concerning myself with the intricate and intrusive symbolism of names in Wilson's drama.

11. Names again: ‘Marks’, homonym ‘Marx’ – especially taken in conjunction with ‘Darwin’ – invokes a whole series of politico-philosophical implications.

12. In the game of Wilsonian allusions in this passage, consider (i) Hamlet's ‘zany’ conversation with Polonius about clouds and camels; (ii) Ionesco's distinction between one-homed and two-homed rhinoceroses; and (iii) the omnipresent advertisements for Camel cigarettes.

13. The ‘Cheeky Chappie’ was the popular designation of the well-known British radio and music-hall comedian, Max Miller.

14. The name is spelt with an ‘r’, as ‘Deirdre’, in the cast list, which would be the more traditional Irish spelling, and associate the character with ‘Deirdre of the Sorrows’, but it is consistently spelt ‘Deidre’ throughout the text.

15. Author's Foreword to A Greenish Man, unpaginated.

16. In a mistaken confusion with the Greek goddess Pallas Athena, Minerva is also frequently associated with the Trojan Wars.

17. See notes 10 and 11.

18. Another important aspect of Wilson's theatre, deserving a study all of its own, is the notion of ‘magic’ as an intrinsic element of the dramatic experience. In his Foreword to The Glad Hand, Wilson describes the purpose of the machinery of theatre as being ‘to inspire the imagination to see and feel what does not exist’. Ritsaat echoes this idea when he is instructing his actors, telling them that what they will need to do is to ‘make solid what is usually shadowy and unreal’ (The Glad Hand, p. 14). Ritsaat is, in this case, referring specifically to ‘the labour monolith, shrouded in dreams of power, turning over in its sleep’, but the claim applies equally to the ‘pleasure principle’ embodied in the gorillas, to the gentleness and humility represented by the pigs, or to the communal soul of the white ant leading to destruction.