Playwright whose anarchic works were filled with vividly imagined characters
Snoo Wilson, who has died suddenly aged 64, was in the vanguard of the young playwrights revolutionising British theatre in the two decades after 1968, but Snoo was a very different kettle of fish from the others. While David Edgar, Howard Brenton and David Hare were often overtly political, Snoo was a Marxist "tendance Groucho"; more subtly subversive and humorous. Sometimes the surface frivolity of his work made people think he wasn't serious, but he was always trying to mine under the surface of things, to allow the subconscious to drive his imagination. Snoo used fiercely imagined characters in comic and often savage works that nevertheless, in the best plays, demonstrated an insouciant knowledge of dramatic structure. He was not a believer in naturalism.
Throughout his career Snoo refused to accept that mere reality was all there was – if so, it was too sad and he refused to believe it. He encouraged audiences to go on a rollercoaster ride into the beyond, albeit with engaging and recognisable characters. It was not whimsy. He was a one-off, quite unlike any other dramatist.
He was born Andrew James Wilson in Reading – Snoo was a childhood nickname – and was educated at Bradfield college, Berkshire, where his father was a teacher and where Snoo obtained a glider pilot's licence. His mother was the headteacher of nearby Downe House. Snoo went on to the University of East Anglia to read American studies under Malcolm Bradbury and graduated in 1969.
In 1968 he was a founder member, with Hare and Tony Bicât, of Portable Theatre. In Pignight (1971), toured by Portable Theatre and directed by Snoo, a paranoid East End gangster and his prostitute girlfriend are sent to guard a battery pig farm inhabited by the ghosts of its former tenants, and are visited, with fatal consequences, by a German prisoner of war/farm worker who has escaped from a local asylum. It is a vivid and emetic portrait of rural change and urban corruption. Lighter and hilarious, The Pleasure Principle (1973), directed by Hare, was a success at the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs and worked on the strategy of always putting a bomb, sometimes literally, under the audience's expectations.
After he had worked as a script editor for the BBC's Play for Today strand, Snoo's plays The Soul of the White Ant (1976) and Vampire (1977), both of which I directed at the Bush theatre, west London, were critically praised. The former was a murkily atmospheric and hilarious Afrikaner ghost story that had the racist biologist Eugène Marais (Clive Merrison) return from the dead to offer atonement to Lynda Marchal (now Lynda La Plante) for the murder of her houseboy. The latter play took the audience from repression and violence in a 19th-century Welsh vicarage, via Freud and Jung, to punks in Kew Gardens, and made an impressive thesis of societal blood-sucking. It ended with Enoch Powell (Merrison again) emerging ghoulishly from a coffin to utter his famous "rivers of blood" speech.
Snoo also wrote plays for larger stages commissioned by the major subsidised companies, though not the National Theatre. The Royal Shakespeare Company had success with his play The Beast (1974), which portrayed the magician Aleister Crowley as a fantasising and seedy hedonist.
The Observer's Robert Cushman praised the "Stoppardian exhilaration" of Snoo's The Glad Hand (1978) at the Royal Court, in which a South African tycoon, played by Antony Sher, employs a troupe of actors and sails an oil tanker through the Bermuda Triangle, hoping to conjure up the antichrist and kill him in a wild west gunfight. Sher also took the main role as a clairvoyant in Philip Saville's 1985 film of Snoo's screenplay Shadey. In that year Snoo was a successful, widely published and prominent writer. His libretto for Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, in which the character of Public Opinion was clearly modelled on Margaret Thatcher, was performed by English National Opera.
But tastes in the theatre change with the political climate. Artistic directors began to look to a dour and nihilistic political theatre to reflect a more despairing zeitgeist, or to more commercial projects to keep their doors open. It was not for another 10 years that Snoo's second golden period began, back at the Bush theatre, under Jenny Topper's management, where Simon Stokes brilliantly directed The Number of the Beast (1982), More Light (1987) and Darwin's Flood (1994). The last of these proposed, ironically of course, Darwin's worst nightmare on his deathbed: that God actually may have existed and planted the fossil evidence himself. Jesus (James Nesbitt) appeared hilariously in the guise of a cycling, wisecracking Ulsterman who seduces Mrs Darwin, before a giant ark breaks through into the back garden. Somewhere in there having fun were Darwin's appalling sister, Friedrich Nietzsche and a dominatrix Madonna – the original one, not the singer. It is a wonderfully witty play of firecracker imagination and humour.
With that kind of ambition things occasionally went awry, and Snoo needed an editor and a strong and sympathetic director. He never shirked the challenge of rewriting, though many of us nearly drowned under the weight of his fecundity.
Playwrights go out of fashion faster than other writers. They are dependent still on a director-led theatre that has a need for fresh reviving talent. In recent years Snoo suffered savage reviews that hurt him deeply and only demonstrated how isolated he was, going so singularly his own way. But things also come full circle and he never gave up. Snoo was busy to the end of his life. He had begun a commissioned play for the Theatre Royal in Plymouth. His play about the painter Egon Schiele, Reclining Nude with Black Stockings, was performed in 2010 at the Arcola theatre. His recently finished play Revelations is rich and personal and of the moment; it is also horribly prescient about a death that has come far too soon. There are plays still to be performed and many are still in print, waiting to be rediscovered and reworked by future generations.
Snoo was a warm and generous man, a loyal friend and as wonderfully eccentric as his work. He laughed a lot, occasionally at his own jokes – a transgression that was easily forgiven.
He is survived by his wife, the journalist Ann McFerran, whom he married in 1976, his daughter, Jo, and two sons, Patrick and David.
• Snoo (Andrew James) Wilson, playwright, born 2 August 1948; died 3 July 2013