Heathcote Williams

• Born: November 15, 1941
• Birthplace: Helsby, Cheshire, England
• Died: July 1, 2017
• Place of death: Oxford, England

Biography

During the 1960s, Heathcote Williams was a regular at London’s Hyde Park, listening to the orators at Speakers’ Corner and watching the audiences they attracted—tourists, radicals, and derelicts. The ideas these speakers generated and the presence in Williams’s life of Billy McGuinness, the anarchistic Irish youth with whom he lived, provided considerable raw material for Williams’s future writing.

John Henley Heathcote Williams was born in Helsby, Cheshire, England, in 1941, to Harold Heathcote Williams, a barrister, and Margaret (Henley) Williams, a homemaker. He attended Eton, then went on to study law at Christ Church, Oxford University, but left before completing his degree.

. McGuinness’s radical views of politics and society helped to shape Williams’s thinking, although he was admittedly less radical than McGuinness, who died in 1967, when he was in his twenties. After his death, Williams found many of McGuinness’s ideas increasingly in line with his own thinking.

In 1964, Williams wrote The Speakers, a play based on the Speakers’ Corner pronouncements he heard during the years in which he frequented Hyde Park. His next play, The Local Stigmatic, is about two protagonists who live in a run-down London neighborhood and relate to street people. These characters resemble Williams and McGuinness. The play premiered at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theater in 1965, and then moved to London. The play was awash in violence and offensive language that alienated some audiences. However, shrewd playgoers were able to see beyond these Theater of Cruelty manifestations to find worthwhile content in the existential questions posed by the play’s protagonists, Ray and Graham. Some critics compared the protagonists to Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

After the staging of AC/DC, a major theatrical triumph in the 1970s, Williams ceased to write for several years. During this time, he was associate editor of the Transatlantic Review. He also cofounded Suck, a journal aimed at promoting political anarchy and sexual freedom, a controlling theme in many of his plays, with feminist Germaine Greer and model Jean Shrimpton, his girlfriend at the time.

Williams’s activism extended beyond the written word during the 1970s. A leader in the squatter movement, Williams established the Ruff Tuff Cream Puff agency in London to help homeless people find vacant spaces in which to live. In 1977, he helped create the Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia, an anarchist secessionist republic in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood. With its own passport and stamps, Frestonia applied for full membership in the United Nations. Williams served as Frestonia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

In his work, Williams examined the media’s manipulative effects on people. He also expressed overarching environmental concerns that are especially evident in such later plays as Autogeddon (pb. 1991), a commentary on the effects of automobiles on contemporary society, and in collections of what he called “investigative poetry”: Whale Nation (1988), Falling for a Dolphin (1989), and Sacred Elephant (1989),which expose the impact that industrialization of the fishing industry has had on sea life. After the staging of AC/DC, a major theatrical triumph in the 1970s, Williams ceased to write for several years. During this time, he was associate editor of the Transatlantic Review and founder of Suck, a journal aimed at promoting political anarchy and sexual freedom, a controlling theme in many of his plays.

In his plays, Williams frequently uses monologues to convey many of his more complex ideas, at times using his monologuists much as Greek dramatists used the chorus, although his monologuists usually express ideas at odds with community mores, whereas the Greek chorus usually reflected the thoughts and feelings of the populace. Williams came to deplore such conventions as the private possession of property, the nuclear family, and individuality, and he regularly struck out against such conventions in his work. Astute critics of his work judged it not on the basis of how closely his ideas coincided with theirs but on the basis of his plays’ structure. They could not ignore his exquisite use of language and the balance he achieved rhetorically in his far-reaching plays.

Williams was productive in his later years, despite health and mobility issues. In 2012 he published a long poem, Shelley in Oxford: Blasphemy, Book Burning and Bedlam, about poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, like Williams, went to Eton, dropped out of Oxford, and wrote passionately about social justice as antiestablishment revolutionaries. Williams’s investigative poem, Royal Babylon, which critiques the British royal family and the monarchy as an institution, appeared online in 2012 before being printed in 2016. That same year, Williams excoriated Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in the pamphlet, Boris Johnson: The Blond Beast of Brexit—A Study in Depravity. In 2017 Williams published his final play, The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency, based on the real estate agency he founded to advocate for squatters in the 1970s. He also released his last volume of poetry, American Porn, a critique of American president Donald J. Trump, in January 2017.

In addition to his achievements as a prolific writer, poet, and activist, Williams was also an accomplished painter, sculptor, actor, and magician. He died on July 1, 2017, at the age of seventy-five. He is survived by his longtime partner, Diana Senior; his sister, Prue Cooper; daughters Lily Williams and China Williams; his son with Polly Samson, Charlie Gilmour, who was adopted by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour; and three grandchildren.

Bibliography

Grimes, William. “Heathcote Williams, Radical British Poet Who Helped Form Anarchist Nation, Dies at 75.” The New York Times, 5 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/05/books/heathcote-williams-radical-british-poet-who-helped-form-anarchist-nation-dies-at-75.html. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

Harding, Luke. “Heathcote Williams, Radical Poet, Playwright and Actor, Dies Aged 75.” The Guardian, 2 July 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/02/heathcote-williams-radical-poet-playwright-actor-dies-aged-75. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

Hunter-Tilney, Ludovic. “Heathcote Williams, Poet and Playwright, 1941–2017.” Financial Times, 7 July 2017, www.ft.com/content/2ef92fbe-623a-11e7-8814-0ac7eb84e5f1. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

O’Grady, Timothy. “Royal Babylon by Heathcote Williams Review: Broadside Poetry Nailed to Palace Door.” Review of Royal Babylon: The Case against the Monarchy, by Heathcote Williams. The Irish Times, 26 Jan. 2016, www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/royal-babylon-by-heathcote-williams-review-broadside-poetry-nailed-to-palace-door-1.2510841. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

Ryder, Richard. “A Poetic Revolutionary.” Review of Shelley at Oxford: Blasphemy, Book-Burning and Bedlam, by Heathcote Williams. Resurgence & Ecologist, 1 May 2013, p. 59. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=88322255&site=ehost-live. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

Ruthven, Heathcote. “Features Back with a Vengeance: Heathcote Williams’s Latest Work Is a Lacerating Attack on Boris Johnson.” Review of The Blond Beast of Brexit: a Study in Depravity, by Heathcote Williams. The Independent, 29 May 2016, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/back-with-a-vengeance-heathcote-williams-s-latest-work-is-a-lacerating-attack-on-boris-johnson-a7054891.html. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

Williams, Heathcote. “An Interview with Heathcote Williams.” By Saira Viola. Gonza Today, 17 Oct. 2015, onzotoday.com/2015/10/17/an-interview-with-heathcote-williams/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018.