Heathcote Williams | British playwright, 75

Heathcote Williams, 75, a British playwright, poet, anarchist, and magician, died Saturday at a hospital in Oxford, England.

The cause was emphysema, said a daughter, Lily Williams.

In addition to founding a secessionist state with a group of London squatters, he wrote one of the most acclaimed plays of the 1970s, along with best-selling poems about dolphins and whales.

Mr. Williams, a reedy Oxford University dropout who for many years sported black combat boots and a mass of curly red hair, emerged from Britain's 1960s counterculture movement as a sort of artistic Prospero, a gifted but mischievous writer whose creative talents recalled those of Shakespeare's sorcerer in The Tempest.

He wrote a dozen plays, many of them critical of society's increasing obsession with celebrity; published several scholarly book-length poems on endangered animals; and cofounded an anarchist publishing house, Open Head Press, that skewered Britain's royal family in pornographic postcards and scurrilous pamphlets.

Despite being championed by figures ranging from the playwright and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter to Hollywood actor Al Pacino, Mr. Williams' work often received little public attention - in large part because of its difficult subject matter and experimental style.

His groundbreaking play AC/DC, which premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1970 and opened in New York the following year, concluded with a trepanation - the piercing of a character's skull. - Washington Post