Snoo Wilson

Drawing together the work of 12 leading playwrights, this National Theatre Connections anthology celebrates highlights from 21 years of the Connections festival with a retrospective selection of plays. Featuring work by some of the most prolific playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries, and together in one volume, the anthology offers young performers between the ages of 13 and 19 an engaging selection of plays to perform, read or study.Each play has been specifically commissioned by the National Theatre's literary department over the years, with the young performer in mind. In 2016, these plays were then performed by approximately 500 schools and youth theatre companies across the UK and Ireland, in partnership with multiple professional partner regional theatres at which the works were showcased. The anthology contains all 12 of the play scripts; notes from the writer and director of each play, addressing the themes and ideas behind the play; and production notes and exercises for the drama groups.This year's anniversary anthology includes plays by Snoo Wilson, Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt; Simon Armitage; Jackie Kay; Patrick Marber; Mark Ravenhill; Bryony Lavery & Frantic Assembly; Davey Anderson; James Graham; Katori Hall; Carl Grose; Stacey Gregg; and Lucinda Coxon.

A second collection of plays from one of Britain's most original dramatists This second volume of plays includes Vampire: 'The height of comedy, a manic, hellzapoppin of invention, sliding from verbal frolics to pure slapstick' (The Times); The Glad Hand: 'A full-blooded theatrical experience which is also - praise be - good fun to watch. Its energetic, imaginative nonsense spills out ideas, situations, crises, comedy and political harangue in a fire-work display of non-sequitur, whiz-bang high spirits' (Sunday Telegraph); The Grass Widow: 'Hilariously confirms that Mr Wilson is the liveliest and most enlivening English dramatists of his generation' (Sunday Telegraph); Sabina: A typically surreal and unrestrained work ...wonderfully theatrical.' (Tribune)"Snoo Wilson tackles dark pockets of human endeavour with an original wit and a savage humour" (Financial Times).

The first collection of plays by one of Britain's most original dramatists This first volume of Snoo Wilson's plays contains a mixture of his best early work from the 1970s and more recent efforts. Long considered to be a legend of Fringe theatre, Snoo Wilson's early plays had such absurd titles as Girl Mad as Pigs and Ella Daybellfesse's Machine. All of Wilson's plays search out strange psychological states in his characters and situations. Blowjob is a dark study in alienation and violence; in Pigsnight a Lincolnshire farm is taken by a sinister gang and turned into a machine for the organised butchering of animals. The Soul of the White Ant explores the weird world of the South African naturalist Eugene Marais whose ideas about a corporate soul lead to insanity. The volume also includes two plays with a Freudian perspective: More Light and Darwin's Flood. The volume includes an introduction by the author and notes by his various collaborators."Snoo Wilson tackles dark pockets of human endeavour with an original wit and a savage humour" (Financial Times).

Nothing is stronger than this love, for I am nothing indeed without you, MasterAwoken from his deathbed by his favourite childhood teddy bear, Turing is led by the hand through the journey of his life, from glowing academia to New York drag bars, from triumph to disgrace. Snoo Wilson’s Lovesong of the Electric Bear is an epic, psychedelic and electrifying trip through the life of Alan Turing, the computer visionary and maths genius whose gifts made him the code-breaking hero of World War II, but whose homosexuality led him to betrayal and vilification by the very establishment who had depended on him for victory. Lovesong of the Electric Bear is a wonderfully imaginative, comic and moving play from one of British theatre’s great voices. The edition publishes to coincide with the European premiere at the Hope Theatre, London, on 24 February 2015.

A surreal fantasy plunging Sir Arthur Conan Doyle into a perilous intergalactic conflict Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - the author, spiritualist and creator of the great rationalist detective, Sherlock Homes - is in search of home-grown fairies in the English village of Cottingley. Suddenly he is catapulted into another world and while impending collision with the meteorite Caledonia threatens catastrophe, he embarks on a fantastic journey with Abraxas 365, the god of gods, to meet the malevolent media magnate Moloch and his raving teenage daughters."Weird and wonderful happenings in Plymouth as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is discovered in search of fairies..." (Guardian)

"I never killed Raoul Loveday with a magical spell". Aleister Crowley, otherwise known as the Beast 666, shared membership of the Golden Dawn with W B Yeats, and publishers with D H Lawrence. Now in a beyond-the-grave autobiography, he recounts his own vocation, his practice of sex magic, and his bruising encounters with his contemporaries. The great magus, whose own world-conquering creed The Book of the Law was written in Cairo in 1904, was according to him, no murderer, but a prophet and practitioner of all kinds of sexual freedom and new magical systems.

Four short plays for young actors The Blue Ball is an imaginative investigation of the experience of Space researched by the playwright among the astronauts themselves. This ambitious play questions the politics of a culture in which the wondrous is rendered mundane and what' commonplace is rendered absurd.Each play includes Production Notes, dealing with setting and staging, costume, lighting and casting. Also included are a set of questions and exercises for workshop classes.