The Greeks understood theatre. They wrapped an audience around the stage area. A small sound made in the centre of the acting space, even a sandal rubbing against the grit on the ground, roared back at the spectators because the space was designed to reflect back to the actors and hold their energy. Theatre is a place of ritual and ceremony. It is a place of power where truths, great and small, can be told.
Playwriting is about events unfolding in front of your eyes, things happening in real time. If you are pulled towards the exploration of conflict and character, then playwriting is a perfect medium for you to explore. Whether it’s a large cast production or a one-hander, drama peers into the human heart, shining a light into its darkness. Whether you like Sophocles, Tennessee Williams or Bertolt Brecht, the theatre has a power and immediacy that can be found nowhere else. If you want to write a play, come to the weekend workshop, "Playwriting for Beginners", to learn about dramatic structure, writing dialogue and developing suspense. You'll have the opportunity to workshop your script and discover why all the world's a stage.
THE TRAINER (with contrbutions from Keith Burstein)
First rehearsed reading at Oxford House, 6 March 2009 & a second at Hackney Empire, London, 21 May 2009
The cast included Tim PIggot-Smith, Corin Redgrave, Roger Lloyd Pack and Jana Zeineddine.
SPITTING INTO THE SKY
The play was featured in the 2004 Dylan Thomas Festival. The cast included Sion Probert, Liz Morgan, Peter Tate, Johnny Tudor, Stan Stennett, Olwen Rees and Anna Gilbert.
"David Wilson & Anne Aylor's play, The Trainer, makes a surreal case for less government interference in our lives & an emotional plea for peace, love & understanding." Tim Pigott-Smith
"The Trainer takes the scandal of an artist bankrupted by the state - the composer Keith Burstein - and brilliantly exposes the threat to our freedoms and civil liberties." Corin Redgrave
"The Trainer is gripping drama. It's a passionate and telling condemnation of an injustice made possible by the anti-terrorism laws." Michael Kustow
"It's not often a stranger grabs your hand and starts crying. But last Thursday at the Hackney Empire a silver-haired woman sitting next to me did just that." Michael Mann, theatre reviewer, Camden New Journal
"[Spitting into the Sky is] A powerful and beautifully written piece of theatre, and I have to say that your mastery of language isn't far off Thomas's himself. I thought you did an excellent job of interweaving the world of the plays and the poems . . . adding the Marx Brothers into the brew lent a wonderfully surreal tone." John Yorke, Head of Drama, BBC TV
"I read Spitting Into the Sky and I loved its imaginative spiralling. I loved the setting and the theatrical gifts it allows you to indulge. I love the idea of the Marx Brothers taking us through the play: I think the language is grand, and worthy of the man." Terry Johnson, director and playwright
"It brings Dylan Thomas to life, warts and all, particularly his relationship to Caitlin. A very original piece of work." Stephen Hearst, ex-Head of Arts, BBC
SIMPLE WRITINGS
London, Duke of Cambridge, 1988
"David Wilson’s dramatisation comes to the stage with a cast of 10 who give themselves ably and ebulliently to the task of peopling Grimmelshausen’s world: it is witty, bawdy, and as profound as anyone cares to consider it." Financial Times
"David Wilson unfurls a sprawling, vibrant, bustling canvas of seventeenth-century German peasant life in the Thirty Years War . . . the play at times works like a painting by Breughel, in its juxtaposition of the ingeniously fanciful and the gruesomely horrific. Time Out
"David Wilson’s Simple Writings brings to often uproarious life a 17th century German novel with overtones of Fielding and Rabelais, but with its own contemplative force." Ham & High
CHILDREN OF THE DUST
First rehearsed reading at the Gate Theatre, London, director: Katie Mitchell. Winer of the 1987 International Playwriting Festival competition and co-produced by the Soho Theatre and the Theatre Warehouse, Croydon, director: Terry Johnson
THE M & M CAFE
Commissioned and published in New Plays 2, editor: Peter Terson, Oxford University Press
HAPPINESS IS NORTH OF HERE
Rehearsed reading at the Gate Theatre, London.
