Heathcote Williams, who has died aged 75, was a unique and brilliant writer – poet, dramatist, visionary and pamphleteer. He restored and renovated a sense of intellectual anarchy in our public discourse in the great traditions of Jonathan Swift, Will- iam Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, all of whom were among his heroes.
Williams himself, an erudite and perpetually incensed Old Etonian non-joiner, was admired early on by William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. He flitted in and out of public acclamation but had lately come into focus, with a fringe theatre revival of his first play, The Local Stigmatic (1966), giving the prophetic and chilling lowdown on today’s celebrity culture; with a devastating poetic broadside entitled Boris Johnson: The Blond Beast of Brexit – A Study in Depravity; and with, at this year’s Brighton festival, The Big Song, a learned treatise of a narrative, complete with a 100-strong choir, on the history of mass music-making with special reference to birdsong, protest song and baby song.
The quality of anger is usually strained, but Williams’s muse was fuelled by a witty and beautiful anger that he channelled in three great poems at the end of the 1980s: Whale Nation, a wonderful hymn to the largest of all the mammals and a plea for their protection, Sacred Elephant, and Autogeddon, a JG Ballard-style ballad about the plague of the motor car. All three were filmed by the BBC, the third performed by Jeremy Irons. Williams himself made notable recordings – on his day, he was a charismatic troubadour – of Buddhist scripture, Dante and the Bible, and a collection of shorter poems, Zanzibar Cats (2011), which skewered political absurdity, planetary destruction and social justice mishaps with delightful glee and great verbal dexterity.
His writing and curiosity led him in many different directions that all seemed, in the end, to converge. He was a member of the Magic Circle, learned fire-eating from Bob Hoskins (and accidentally set himself ablaze when demonstrating his new talent to his then girlfriend, the model Jean Shrimpton), discovered a new species of honey-producing wasp in the Amazon, helped establish the independent state of Frestonia (in Notting Hill in the 70s) while running a venture for squatters, the Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency – which attracted the unlikely approval of the shadow chancellor, Geoffrey Howe – and starred as the inscrutable magician Prospero in Derek Jarman’s extraordinary 1979 film of The Tempest (in which Elisabeth Welch sang Stormy Weather with a bunch of sailors).
John Henley Heathcote Williams, the son of a barrister, Harold Heathcote Williams, and his wife, Julian (nee Henley), was born in Helsby, Cheshire, and was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied law but did not take his degree as he was already researching his first book, about the postwar soap-box orators in Hyde Park. In the mid-60s he became a pin-up of the underground press and a talismanic, though always elusive, figure in the counter-culture of the day.
He was a founding editor with Bill Levy, Jim Haynes and Germaine Greer of the sexual liberation newspaper, Suck. In his autobiography Thanks for Coming! Haynes recalls that, in their first meeting, “Heathcote and Jean [Shrimpton] excused themselves to go into another room to make love. Bill, Germaine and I continued to talk. Later, when the paper folded, I looked back on this meeting as our first mistake. We should all five have made love together.”
Williams’s reputation was made on the International Times, and with The Speakers (1964), which Pinter reviewed encouragingly (“These are the only people I’d ever want to listen to”) before inviting Williams to provide a short play to go with one of his own on a double-bill at the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh. The Local Stigmatic (which in 1990 would become a fairly good movie produced by, and starring, Al Pacino) was then presented at the Royal Court in London and was hailed by the critic John Russell Taylor as “a succession of savage encounters composed with the utmost care and precision of style in mustering an extraordinary battery of insults and threats”.
Four years later, in 1970, the Court got round to producing another script of what proved to be Williams’s signature play, AC/DC, after it had been collecting dust in the interim. This study of warring states of mind, originally titled Skizotopia, ended with the lead character being amateurishly trepanned in response to the “information explosion” in which “all ideas and opinions would be available to all people and therefore rendered impotent”. A front-page review in the Times Literary Supplement (by Charles Marowitz) hailed “the first play of the 21st century”, while the play’s director, Nicholas Wright, identified the rich paradox of a piece that conveyed the non-verbal with such fantastic command of language.
Wright also noted that Williams “showed no ambition to do anything so silly as conquer the theatre” and always stayed as cheerful and classy as ever, “the man you most want to bump into walking round a corner”. But when the Court veterans William Gaskill and Max Stafford-Clark launched their touring Joint Stock company in 1975, their opening show was a promenade staging of The Speakers, and Williams fleshed out his platform oratory with additional conversations and plot development.
Other short plays of this decade included Remember the Truth Dentist (1974), summarised by one critic as a full-frontal assault on the western “death culture” in favour of “a Zen- and sperm-orientated Mongolian cluster-fuck”, and Hancock’s Last Half Hour (1977), a short monologue for the morose comic (played by Henry Woolf, Pinter’s friend from Hackney schooldays) on the brink of suicide in an Australian hotel, defining laughter as “thoracic epilepsy cured by a poke in the eye with a wet stick” and making jokes as “a leap into outer space”.
One of my favourite moments in any work of Williams came in this Hancock suicide note when, after the lights went down and came up after a scene change, the comic, stretched out on the floor, said to the audience: “That was my blackout, not yours.”
A cascade of poetry and pamphlets ensued over the years, many of them self-published, or distributed privately. I have no idea how long his Christopher Marlowe play, Killing Kit, has been languishing unperformed; admittedly there have been countless mediocre plays about Marlowe, but none so convinced of his victimisation, as both a voracious homosexual and a threat to the entire political system, by the intelligence services: “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,” as Marlowe himself said of Faustus.
Williams, who lived in Oxford with his longterm partner Diana Senior, a historian, joked that he had spent the last 20 years in obscurity and illness. After his “second bout” of fame with the long poems, he characteristically turned to something new, painting and sculpting, and becoming proficient in both disciplines. But then, along with the Boris broadside and the Brighton sing-song, he popped up with another fringe play earlier this year, penning The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency, a delightful, funny evocation of the squatters’ movement, for Adrian Jackson’s Cardboard Citizens season of Home Truths.
Apart from The Tempest, Williams made, when invited, occasional, desultory appearances in movies – Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), Mike Figgis’s The Browning Version (1994) and Miss Julie (1999), Des McAnuff’s Cousin Bette (1998) with Jessica Lange and Bob Hoskins, and even Basic Instinct 2 (2006) – but these were like holiday jobs. His overriding commitment was to the written word as a means of liberation, activism, galvanic dissent, the harrowing of hell and the soaring of souls.
He died after an extended period of ill health, and is survived by Diana and their two daughters, China and Lily, three grandchildren, Freya, Albi and Wilf; Charlie Gilmour, his son with the novelist Polly Samson; and his younger sister, Prue.
• John Henley Heathcote Williams, poet and dramatist, born 15 November 1941; died 1 July 2017
