SOHO: PLAY+BOOK CELEBRATION – THE IMMORTALIST/AMERICAN PORN BY HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS
A play on the nature of time, ageing, and death by the cult countercultural poet Heathcote Williams. In it, a skeptical TV reporter (Alison Mullin) interviews a 278 year old man – The Immortalist (Jack Moylett) – about the alternatives to death. He argues against passivity: “people foul up because they stay in the same place. They’ve traded utopia for reality. They’ve traded their instinct for politics.”
Also featuring readings from Williams’ topical new book American Porn, a study of U.S. politics after Donald Trump, performed by actor Alan Cox. Published on inauguration day by Thin Man Press, this is an inflammatory, chilling, and darkly hysterical book of poems in the tradition of 18th century political satire such as Swift and Pope. Ignore at your peril.
Join us for a drink on this immersive, relaxed, surreal, and electric evening. Before the show begins there will be a comfortable cafe atmosphere with music, snacks, and signed copies of American Porn.
Tickets are £10 for non-members, £5 of which redeemable against a copy of American Porn. Please click here to purchase. (Free for members).
Launching this Saturday at Soho’s The Society Club: a performance of the 1978 play The Immortalist, and readings from 2017’s American Porn – a collection of ‘investigative poems’ to mark the inauguration of U.S. President, Donald Trump – both written by cult hero Heathcote Williams.
How to describe Heathcote Williams? Anarchist, magician, lyricist, squatter, graffiti artist, and counter-cultural icon. Williams’ first book The Speakers (1964), a surreal ethnography of London’s most famous public ranting spot, Speakers’ Corner, garnered him fan mail from Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, and Harold Pinter. His epic paean to the world’s largest mammal, Whale Nation (1988), has been hailed as a modern version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The American rights sold for £100,000, all of which Williams’ donated to charities.
In a burst of creative energy, Williams has recently published a body of incendiary and beautiful works: Royal Babylon, a searing anti-monarchist tract published by Skyscraper Books: Boris Johnson: The Blond Beast of Brexit – A Study in Depravity, a dissection of the former Mayor of London which was hailed by the London Review of Books as ‘book of the week’ published by Public Reading Rooms; The Last Dodo and Dreams of Flying, a collection of deeply moral poems exploring the destruction of the natural world published by New River Press.
“Scourge of the establishment for 50 years, Heathcote Williams is back with a vengeance…”
The Independent
On the evening of Febuary 4th 2017, at booksellers’/cocktail bar The Society Club, from 7.30-10.00pm, there will be a performance of The Immortalist presented by theatrical duo Wandering Albatross, and readings from American Porn by the acclaimed actor Alan Cox.
The Immortalist, published in 1978, is a play on the nature of time, aging, and death, in which a sceptical TV reporter interviews a 278-year-old man about the alternatives to mortality. American Porn, published in 2017, is a timely collection of poems investigating America today, a nation which owes its very name to an early Italian pornographer, and that has been steeped for centuries in violence, artifice and greed, only today reaching its apotheosis in Donald Trump.
. Tickets £10 and can be purchased from http://www.thesocietyclub.com/events-1
– email any questions to [email protected]
The Society Club is described in the Guardian by Amy Lamé, Mayor Khan’s ‘Night Tsar of London’, as “one of those hidden places you think don’t exist any more – but this one does.
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