Skip to main content

Heathcote Williams and Pip Utton - Hancock's Last Half Hour

Comic genius Tony Hancock had been dead for almost a decade by the time
Heathcote Williams' solo play, Hancock's Last Half Hour, first appeared
in 1977. Since that first production at The Almost Free Theatre, in
which stalwart of Harold Pinter plays Henry Woolf played The Lad
Himself, as he prepared to commit suicide in a Sydney hotel room with
only a scrap-book of newspaper cuttings, a telephone and a bottle of
vodka for company. Like the legend of Hancock himself, however,
Williams' play has lived on.

The late Richard Briers played Hancock in a radio version ofd Hancock's
Last Half Hour in 1988. At that time, Pip Utton, who revives Williams'
play for this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was still working as a
jeweller, and it would be several years before he picked up a copy of
the play in a secondhand book shop and go on to launch his acting
career with a portrayal of a man friends told him he resembled.
Twenty-one years on, Utton has performed in solo plays as real life
characters from Adolf Hitler to Charlie Chaplin, with Charles Dickens
and Winston Churchill en route. It was Hancock, however, who started it
all.

“I was amazed at the level of affection there was for him,” reflects
Utton. “It was amazing as well how big he was. He was a mega-star in
the UK, and was as big as the Beatles. Even today, people who are maybe
too young to remember Hancock will still recognise some of his lines.
That's how big he was, and the play's powerful, both because Hancock is
so familiar, and because he breaks down and disintegrates in front of
you.”

For Williams, a key figure in the British counter-culture of the 1960s
as a poet, playwright, performer and polemicist, Hancock's Half Hour
was an early look at the curse of fame, one of his work's perennial
themes. Hancock's Half was also written out of a very personal set of
circumstances.

“There was an old rock and roller who was in a play of mine, Remember
the Truth Dentist, in the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court,”
Williams remembers of a play directed by the late Ken Campbell, who
Williams acted alongside as Prospero in Derek Jarman's film of
Shakespeare's The Tempest. “He was called Roy Martin. He dragged me
into Foyles in Charing Cross Road and said you have to buy anything and
everything on Hancock and write a play about him.

“I do remember that Hancock was the one piece of common ground I shared
with my father. Fractious and curmudgeonly, he'd had his pelvis crashed
in the war, he used to roar with laughter at Hancock, and I could see
it was therapeutic. Though my father was hard to warm to, Hancock
provided moments when I could warm to him, so I had a personal reason
for valuing him.”

On the surface, at least, Hancock's Half Hour has less of a
revolutionary intent than some of Williams' other works. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, his trilogy of ecologically inclined epic poems,
Whale Nation, Sacred Elephant and Autogedden, all made waves, either in
lavishly published editions, on film or in performance in Edinburgh.
More recently, Roy Hutchins performed  Williams' radically inclined
Zanzibar Cats on the Fringe in 2011, when Williams was awared a Herald
Archangel.

This was followed by a volume of science-based poems, Forbidden Fruit,
a biography of Shelley and a new epic, Royal Babylon: The Criminal
Record of the British Monarchy. Then there is Williams' ongoing
alliance with The Poetry Army, a touring collective that performs
Williams' work in a way that has become a kind of conscience of the
nation.

“The Poetry Army shows how many revolutions have begun with a poem,”
Williams says of the initiative.

Now aged seventy-two, Williams' output shows no sign of drying up. His
latest play, Killing Kit, about playwright Christopher Marlowe,
received a performed reading at the Cockpit Theatre in February.
Film-maker and former member of radical theatre troupe, The People
Show, Mike Figgis, has expressed a desire to direct it.

In the meantime, Hancock lives again in a way that personifies the
figure of the tragic clown.

“Why are comedians so vulnerable?” Williams muses. “Vivien Leigh said
it was much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh. It's not
a skill that you can learn. It's a gift, and a gift can be taken back.
Look at the tragic people who are no longer funny, usually because
they've taken the devil's shilling and done TV commercials. Somehow, as
if by some diabolic magic, they then become unfunny. Comedy has to be
subversive, and can't embrace commerce's creeping meatball. Hancock was
reactionary in many ways, but he was also anarchic.”

Hancock's Last Half Hour, Assembly Rooms, July 30-Aug 9, 12 noon-1pm
www.arfringe.com

The Herald, August 14th 2014


ends






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL