ABSTRACT
It is impossible to separate Wilson the stage designer from Wilson the director, since he has united these two roles consistently throughout his career. He can be described as an auteur director, in the wake of the two major figures of twentieth-century theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Edward Gordon Craig, who were the first to claim this practice. Yet even this broad category is not quite adequate, given that Wilson is a remarkable performer and that his singular creative energy also encompasses a writer, a painter, a sculptor and, as well, an installation, video, and landscape artist. More still, Wilson has an unusual facility for trespassing on recognized territories, having established with such early works as Deafman Glance (1971) and Einstein on the Beach (1976) that theatre and dance, let alone design and other areas of the visual arts, are not confined to generic borders but can coalesce to form what came to be known in the 1980s as ‘hybrids’ or, soon afterwards, as ‘mixed media’ and then ‘intermedial’ performance. His multiple abilities are embodied in Wilson’s designs, not least for his Shakespeare productions.
