Acclaimed playwright, director and artist was known for his opera Einstein on the Beach and many A-list collaborations
Robert Wilson, renowned theatre director, playwright and artist, has died at the age of 83.
His death was confirmed by the Watermill Center, an arts hub Wilson founded in Water Mill, New York. He died peacefully after “a brief but acute illness”.
Wilson’s career in theatre started in the late 1960s when he started the performance art group the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds in New York, named after a teacher who helped him with a stammer. He went on to create the four-act opera Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass in the mid-1970s.
After the show toured Europe, Wilson wanted to put it on in New York and decided that the Metropolitan Opera House would be the best venue but they said no so he rented it himself. “It cost $90,000, a lot of money,” he said to the Guardian in 2012. “It sold out, so we put on a second performance. It was a crazy mixture of people who turned up, traditional opera-goers and people who had never been before. Even so, we ended up in debt, but those performances really established us both.”
