[2] He was educated at Bradfield College, where his father taught,[3] and the University of East Anglia (UEA), graduating with a degree in American and English Literature in 1969.

[3] Wilson's early plays, the one-act Girl Mad as Pigs and the two-act Ella Daybellfesse's Machine, were first produced at UEA in, respectively, June and November 1967.

[1][6] His plays from these years included four one-act works, Charles the Martyr (1970), Device of Angels (1970), Pericles, The Mean Knight (1970) and Reason (1972), most of which dealt with overtly political subjects.

[8] Blow-Job is a political exploration of urban violence during which a quantity of raw meat is thrown on stage to simulate the corpse of an Alsatian dog that has just been blown up.

[9] With some reservations, Irving Wardle praised the piece in The Times for its "authentic sense of horror … its intermingling of physical outrage and savage farce.

Billington wrote, "On the one hand it is a strenuous indictment of ownership, property, greed and personal exploitation: on the other, it is a madhouse extravaganza that operates on the good old comic principle of always putting a bomb under the audience's expectations.

"[12] Other full-length plays of this period were Vampire (1973) written for Paradise Foundry, The Beast (1974), staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Everest Hotel (1975) for Bush Theatre, which he also directed.

[3] Wilson was successful with screenplays and teleplays in the 1970s, including Sunday for Seven Days (1971), The Good Life (1971), More About the Universe (1972), Swamp Music (1973), The Barium Meal (1974), The Trip to Jerusalem (1974), Don't Make Waves (1975) and A Greenish Man (1979).

[1] In 1975 and 1976, he was dramaturge to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and in 1976 he married the journalist Ann McFerran, a theatre critic, with whom he had two sons, Patrick and David, and a daughter, Jo.

[6][13] In 1978, The Glad Hand, in which a South African tycoon employs a troupe of actors and sails an oil tanker through the Bermuda Triangle, hoping to conjure up the Anti-Christ and kill him in a Wild West gunfight, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre and won the John Whiting Award.

[4] Wilson's style grew away from the overtly political manner of his contemporaries David Hare and Howard Brenton,[15] and he often wrote about the arcane, the occult, and the irrational, whether in the Gothic intrigues of Vampire (1973), the space aliens of Moonshine (1999), or the duelling wizards of The Number of the Beast (1982).

[2] Of his non-theatre works, his 1984 novel, Spaceache, was described by Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer as "a dystopian fantasy of a grim and ruthless high-technology low-competence future".

[22] John Melmoth, the reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement, wrote that Wilson scored in his "nearness to the knuckle … a quirky, unpleasant and emetic sense of humour.

[3][18][24] The Times called Wilson, "the wild man of the theatre, a playwright of extravagant and idiosyncratic talent who broke most of the rules and never settled for the safe and ordinary.