Mark Twain famously declared that other people could go to Heaven if they wanted — he would far rather stay in his beloved Bermuda.

And more than a century after his death the writer’s irreverent spirit does indeed linger on here, channelled by Bermudian actor Gavin Wilson in his celebrated one-man show Mark Twain: Reminiscences & Other Lies.

Over the winter months Mr Wilson gave a series of well-received candlelit dinner theatre performances of Reminiscences & Other Lies at the Bermuda National Trust’s historic Verdmont property. Beginning on May 9, he is taking his Mark Twain show on the road for appearances at the Fourways Inn every Monday evening throughout the summer.

Twain’s 43-year love affair with Bermuda began with his first visit here in 1867. It extended until just a few days before his death in 1910, when the ailing 74-year-old author returned to his Connecticut home from a final holiday in the island where he found solace and sanctuary for so long.

Initially simply intrigued by the literary lion’s Bermuda associations, Mr Wilson started to delve deeper into the life and work of the author more than three decades ago.

As he began to study Twain, Mr Wilson — like untold millions of readers before and since — quickly fell under the spell of the Sage of the Mississippi.

He was captivated by Twain’s remarkable use of language and humour, the timelessness of his observations on human nature and behaviour and his inspired interweaving of truth and moonshine into a storytelling style at once antic and elegant.

All of these qualities permanently endeared Twain to the Bermuda actor. He had soon installed him in his pantheon of personal heroes and began developing the one-man show he has been performing for close to 20 years now, both in Bermuda and internationally.

Alternately mischievous and deeply serious, puckish and profound, Mr Wilson’s intimate portrayal of a 70-year-old Twain is adapted from the public talks the Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn writer gave for decades. Spending almost as much time on the lecture platform as he did wielding a pen, Twain offered audiences of his day a mixture of whimsical good humour, folksy tales stretched tall on the rack of his inspired imagination and knife-edged and still topical satirical commentaries on topics ranging from to politics to race to religion.

Mr Wilson is as comfortable mingling the sublime with the overtly ridiculous as his on-stage alter-ego. And he has not only mastered hours of Twain’s lecture material which he draws on for his 60-minute performances but also his now-legendary stage manner: a drawling, devil-may-care delivery, precisely timed pauses, feigned lapses of memory, seemingly random but, in fact, adroitly planned digressions and even occasional spells of drowsiness.

He dresses and looks the part as well. A contemporary critic once said of Twain’s public talks: “The drollery of his appearance [invests] the commonplace and wearisome with a freshness and comicality that is irresistible …” Mr Wilson’s wardrobe and deftly applied make-up ensure his own appearance is equally droll, completing the illusion the great man is holding forth.

Outfitted in one of the trademark white linen suits favoured by the humorist, head crowned with a custom-made mane of a wig, face camouflaged by a bristling moustache, thundercloud eyebrows and Romanesque nose, Mr Wilson doesn’t so much mimic as become Twain.

Mr Wilson’s show is far more than a mere mechanical recitation of Mark Twain’s greatest rib-ticklers and plain-spoken profundities.

It’s a full-throated and fully realised celebration of the sparkling public persona created and crafted by Missouri-born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who claimed to be altogether less funny, less insightful and less tall than his literary alter-ego.

In many ways the template for every modern comic pundit from Will Rogers to John Oliver, Mark Twain the public speaker had the ability to tickle the funny bones of Victorian and Edwardian audiences while also pricking their consciences.

His Irish contemporary George Bernard Shaw, every bit as much “a moralist in disguise” as Twain, said he and the American shared a particular talent — an ability to “put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang us believe that we are joking”.

Honoured last year by the Bermuda Arts Council with its lifetime achievement award, Mr Wilson is now almost as much a local institution as Twain, one of the island’s favourite adopted sons.

Trained at the BBC in London, Mr Wilson has had a long and varied stage career.

It’s one that has encompassed everything from Shakespearean roles to parts in modern masterworks by such playwrights as Joe Orton and Terence Rattigan to appearances as the Dame in Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society Christmas pantomimes.

He is also the operator of — and comic foil to — Aloysius Lockjaw Fox, the lifesized puppet of a homespun St David’s Island fisherman-philosopher with an endless stock of salty aphorisms and even saltier turns of phrase.

Cantankerous octogenarian Lockjaw — designed by the late Royal Gazette cartoonist Peter Woolcock and fabricated and assembled by Bermudian portrait artist Diana Tetlow — has been a fixture on the local theatre and club circuit for more than 15 years.

But the signature and most frequently revisited role in the Mr Wilson repertoire is Mark Twain.

Like the writer-cum-lecturer himself, who had the ability “to make [audiences] laugh until they are glad when the performance is over so that they can rest their aching sides”, Mr Wilson is a master of both his material and comic timing.

Idiosyncratically self-assured without ever succumbing to self-importance, able to draw sharp moral lessons without moralising, sometimes curmudgeonly but never unlovable, his Twain — as was the case with the original — is “the embodiment of all that is droll … The witty things in his writings … sound … more comical when repeated by the author in his inimitable style”.

Like all actors who portray Twain, Mr Wilson acknowledges an incalculable debt to Hal Holbrook. The Emmy- and Tony Award-winning American performer and inexhaustible amateur Mark Twain scholar has arguably done more than any other single individual in recent decades to keep the name and spirit of the great writer alive, both in the US and around the world.

Known for roles in such films as Magnum Force,All The President’s Men and, most recently, director Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Lincoln as well as his TV and Broadway work, Mr Holbrook has intermittently barnstormed America in his one-man Mark Twain Tonight!show for 60 years now.

Still making more than 20 appearances a year at the age of 91, Mr Holbrook has appeared as Twain in big cities and small towns in all 50 states as well as taking the show to 20 other countries.

In fact it was a 1985 Bermuda performance of Mark Twain Tonight! at City Hall, in a visit sponsored by the US Consul General, which first whetted Mr Wilson’s interest in the author.

And last year Mr Wilson attended a special performance of what is now the longest-running show in American theatrical history held as a gala fundraiser for the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut on Mr Holbrook’s 90th birthday.

After the show he attended a small private dinner for Mr Holbrook organised by the museum’s executive director and regular Bermuda visitor, Dr Cindy Lovell, where the twain met, as it were.

They then proceeded to compare notes and anecdotes on their shared love of the man routinely described as America’s greatest writer, greatest humorist and greatest moral philosopher until the wee hours. It was, says Mr Wilson, among the most memorable and meaningful evenings of his life.

Mark Twain “always loved Bermuda, from the first day of his first visit, to that last day of his final visit, when he sailed away with the shadows already gathering just ahead,” said his secretary and official biographer Albert Bigelow Paine.

And from his time until our own that love has always been reciprocated. For Mark Twain: Reminiscences & Other Lies is nothing if not a heartfelt valentine from a Bermudian to the man who always said he would be grateful to this island for having provided him with an earthly taste of heaven. Given his famously jaded views on religion, Twain liked to joke, he was, after all, never likely to see the real place even if it did exist.

• For more information on show times, tickets and the menu for the Fourways Inn dinner theatre presentations of Mark Twain: Reminiscences & Other Lies, please visit www.marktwain.bm