Adrian Mitchell: THE POET and playwright Adrian Mitchell, in whom the legacies of Blake and Brecht coalesce with the zip of Little Richard and the swing of Chuck Berry, has died of heart failure at the age of 76.
In his many public performances in this country and around the world, he shifted English poetry from correctness and formality towards inclusiveness and political passion.
Mitchell's original plays and stage adaptations, performed on mainstream national stages and fringe venues, on boats and in nature, add up to a musical, epic and comic form of theatre, a poet's drama worthy of Aristophanes and Lorca.
Across the spectrum of his prolific output, through wars, oppressions and deceptive victories, he remained a beacon of hope in darkening times. He was a natural pacifist, a playful, deeply serious peacemonger and an instinctive democrat.
He was born in north London "near Hampstead Heath", which he loved like an extra limb for the rest of his life. His mother Kathleen was a nursery school teacher, his father Jock was a research chemist, who underwent the agony of the first World War, an experience that helped to plant in Adrian a hatred of war.
He went through his own childhood version of hell in a school full of bullies, whose playground he characterised as "the killing ground". His next school, Greenways, was idyllic. There he staged his first play at the age of nine, and went on writing and performing plays with his friend Gordon Snell. His schooling was completed as a boarder at Dauntsey's in Wiltshire.
He did his national service in the RAF - "it confirmed my natural pacifism" - then went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he became editor of the student weekly Isis. He wrote poems in the disciplined forms of the Movement, won prizes, published a pamphlet.
Equipped for journalism, he joined the Oxford Mail in 1955 and then the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary, until 1963.
Later he became a television critic and wrote about pop music; the Sunday Times fired him for reviewing the embargoed anti-nuclear film The War Game.
However, he had set his sights on becoming a writer. With a small legacy from his mother, he left journalism and wrote a television play and his first novel, If You See Me Comin' (1962), a bluesy, chilling account of an execution in a glum provincial city.
Like all of his portrayals of injustice, it is coloured by a barely suppressed sense of terror.
Meanwhile he was reading his poems in the burgeoning British movement of performed poetry.
He began to bring out a steady flow of poetry volumes, from Out Loud (1968) to Tell Me Lies (it will be published next year) - 15 books of free, syncopated, carnivalesque poems about love, war, children, politicians, pleasure, music.
The 1960s brought two life-changing events for Mitchell. He met the actor Celia Hewitt; she was his partner for the last 47 years. He also met Jeremy Brooks, literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He showed his lyrics to Peter Brook, who was looking for someone to adapt a literal translation of Peter Weiss's play The Marat/Sade.
Brook jumped and Adrian worked to the bone to meet a rehearsal deadline and make a glittering, dark text for this 1964 kaleidoscopic play about revolution on the street and in the head.
Adrian wrote more than 30 plays, operas, children's plays, classic adaptations. The musical nature of his imagination led him to work with a cavalcade of composers and performers: Andy Roberts, Richard Peaslee, Steve McNeff, Dominic Muldowney, Andrew Dixon and Stephen Warbeck.
His influence radiated widely, not least to generations of teachers, who used his poems with children in schools.
Celia, two sons, three daughters and nine grandchildren survive him.
Adrian Mitchell: born October 24th, 1932; died December 20th, 2008