AC/DC Playscript 63

AC/DC Plays #1

by Heathcote Williams

AC/DC Playscript 63.

137 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

John Henley Jasper Heathcote-Williams was an English poet, actor and award-winning playwright. He was also an intermittent painter, sculptor and long-time conjuror. After his schooldays at Eton, he hacksawed his surname's double-barrel to become Heathcote Williams, a moniker more in keeping perhaps with his new-found persona. His father, also named Heathcote Williams, was a lawyer. He is perhaps best known for the book-length polemical poem Whale Nation, which in 1988 became "the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling." In the early 1970s his agitational graffiti were a feature on the walls of the then low-rent end of London's Notting Hill district. From his early twenties, Williams has enjoyed a minor cult following. His first book, The Speakers (1964), a virtuoso close-focus account of life at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, was greeted with unanimous critical acclaim. In 1974 it was successfully adapted for the stage by the Joint Stock Theatre Company.

Reviews

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

a play about celebrity, paparazzi, reality TV all before any of these things were really established. And it hasn't dated any with powerful staged images. there is one brutal act in it which may upset the reader/audience, so not for the queasy. But a stunning indictment of all the things in our uperficial society from way back when they were starting to infiltrate the public and cultural psyche.

[Richard Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love early Hawkwind, Robert Anton Wilson and Daisy Eris Campbell (who should direct a production just as soon as someone's intelligent enough to make her Artistic Director of Birmingham Rep), then you must read this! Heathcote Williams appears to be as criminally underrated by the too frequently philistine British theatrical establishment as Howard Barker and as Ms Campbell herself. True, it would need a most committed and strong minded creative team to put it across; the three main characters are deeply damaged, confused and, at times, perversely destructive but, if they got it right, these compromised but uncompromising truth seekers would live in an audience's memory forever.

[Catherine. · Rating 5 out of 5]

i need this book for my project.