My first encounter with a piece by Robert Wilson came in 1995, not in a theatre but in the Clink Street Vaults, in what is now the London district of Bankside. HG was a vast installation, devised by Wilson with Hans Peter Kuhn to celebrate the centenary of HG Wells’s science fiction novella The Time Machine, and mounted by the Artangel organisation.
It consisted of a series of highly theatrical, beautifully lit and subtly soundscaped tableaux that you walked through, crossing millennia and geography: a wartime hospital and an Agincourt-like rain of arrows frozen over a medieval castle stood in contrast to intimate rooms full of curated objects, amd where medicines had been mixed, where small discoveries were made, at your own pace.
Time, light, sound and structure conspired together to result in a startling journey. Nothing “happened”, but the collision of history and imagination that was Wilson’s hugely theatrical vision continues to haunt.
