Robert Wilson

Although never a mainstream theatremaker, Robert Wilson had an army of devotees in the world of performance art on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in Europe. His prolific output over six decades spanned theatre, opera, architecture, set and lighting design and visual art.

The New York Times described him as “a towering figure in the world of experimental theatre and an explorer in the uses of time and space on stage”, while the writer Susan Sontag said of his work that “it has the signature of a major artistic creation”.

Born in Waco, Texas, Wilson attended the University of Texas before studying architecture and design at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Moving to New York in the 1960s, he was drawn to the pioneering choreography of George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. By the late 1960s, he was at the centre of a group of performance artists known as the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, in 1969 producing The King of Spain at the Anderson Theater and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

In 1971, he conceived a silent opera, Le Regard du Sourd (Deafman Glance), in collaboration with Raymond Andrews, a talented deaf boy he had adopted. He joined forces with the composer Philip Glass to create the acclaimed five-hour-long Einstein on the Beach at the Festival d’Avignon and the New York Metropolitan Opera House in 1976. It has since been revived in world tours in 1984, 1992 and 2012.

Following his first visit to the UK in 1978 with I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating, with choreographer Lucinda Childs, at London’s Royal Court, he returned often.

Notable were two visits to Edinburgh International Festival with his adaptations of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights in 1993 and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando starring Miranda Richardson in 1996.

More recently, his stunning, dislocating take on Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape was seen at the Enniskillen Beckett Festival in 2012 and London’s Barbican Centre in 2015.

Wilson’s other equally innovative adaptations included works by Shakespeare (King Lear, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest); Ibsen (When We Dead Awaken, The Lady from the Sea and Peer Gynt); Wole Soyinka; Daniil Kharms; Goethe; and Sophocles.

Among the artists from multiple disciplines who he collaborated with were the actor Tilda Swinton, novelist William S Burroughs, film-maker Jim Jarmusch, dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and the German dramatist Heiner Müller.

In 2013, he worked alongside pop star Lady Gaga, opera singer Renée Fleming and actors Alan Cumming and Brad Pitt for his Video Portraits series, which formed part of the installation of art and objects from his own collection, entitled Living Rooms, at the Louvre in Paris.

The recipient of two Rockefeller and two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1986 Wilson was the sole nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the CIVIL warS, an opera featuring the music of Glass. He received two Henry Hewes Design awards for A Letter to Queen Victoria (1975) and the CIVIL warS Act V (1987); a Bessie award for The Knee Plays (1987); two Italian Premio Ubu awards; the Golden Lion award for sculpture at the Venice Biennale for Memory/Loss (1993); a German Critics award for The Black Rider (1990); a Smithsonian National Design award (2001); a French Critics award for A Dream Play (2002); and an Olivier award in 2013 for Einstein on the Beach as best new opera production.

Heavily influenced by Brecht, the twin pillars of Wilson’s work were ambiguity and an opposition to naturalism. He talked about “the lie of naturalism”, believing that artificiality was more honest. He told the Guardian in 2015: “Writers should not pronounce what they think their play is about because such pronouncements discourage multiple interpretations. You don’t have to understand every second. Let the audience get lost. It’s okay.”

Since the early 1990s, Wilson conducted workshops for students and creative professionals from around the world at the Watermill Center in Long Island, an interdisciplinary centre for the arts and humanities that he set up in 1992.

Robert Mims Wilson was born on October 4, 1941, and died on July 31, aged 83. He is survived by his adopted son, Raymond Andrews.