Adrian Mitchell was a playwright, a journalist and one of Britain’s foremost performance poets. Much of his early and best-known work attacked nuclear armament, Western imperialism — especially with regard to the war in Vietnam — capitalism and racism. His style was acerbic, and his techniques were broadranging: poems virtually free of hard rhythm and metre were published alongside tum-ti-tum lyrics that used structure as much as vocabulary to satirise targets and explore the 1960s themes that Mitchell helped to popularise.

Such was the potency of his verses that they often became refrains at left-wing rallies. He performed many hundreds of readings in theatres, colleges, pubs, prisons, streets, public transport, cellars, clubs and schools. Mitchell was among the first of the performance poets along with fellow public reciters the Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri. Mitchell’s work, however, was flecked with much more of a political edge.

One of his best known poems, called Fifteen Million Plastic Bags, describes an imaginary walk around a warehouse where the government kept the body bags it would need in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. “Five million bags were six feet long/ Five million were five foot five/ Five million were stamped with Mickey Mouse/ And they came in a smaller size.” Another well-known poem, entitled To Whom It May Concern, tackles the way Western governments presented the war in Vietnam. “Coat my eyes with butter/ Fill my ears with silver/ Stick my legs in plaster/ Tell me lies about Vietnam,” he wrote.

Later works satirised new Labour policies. In Haiku Politics, for instance, he wrote: “For the holy name of ‘Spam’/ please substitute ‘Blair’. ”

Mitchell explained the way he liked to approach poetry in the introduction to his collection All Shook Up: Poems 1997-2000, which was published in 2000: “I like the Lone Ranger kick of riding into a new town to perform my poems but I also like forming or joining a theatre gang and working as part of a team.” He was also concerned that poetry needed to be emotional. In an interview with The Argotist magazine he said: “I want to speak, to sing to total strangers. It’s my way of talking to the world or a small part of it. So I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn’t believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.”

Mitchell often juxtaposed love and war to evoke the free-love attitudes prevalent in the 1960s of his relative youth. In To You he wrote: “Make love. We must make love/ Instead of making money”. Elsewhere he combined his admiration for lush romantics with a deep distaste for the monarchy: “Edward the Eighth/ Crazy King/ He really knew how to shake that thing.”

Mitchell revelled in language and his work attracted the praise of, among others, Ted Hughes and Angela Carter, who described him as a “joyous, acrid and demotic tumbling lyricist Pied Piper determinedly singing us away from catastrophe”.

Mitchell was also a prolific writer for the theatre. He adapted works by a number of writers, including Lope de Vega, Henrik Ibsen and Nikolai Gogol. Mitchell wrote plays for the RSC and the National Theatre.

In 1980-81 he held the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship at the University of Cambridge; he was writer in residence at the Unicorn Theatre for Children in London, in 1982-83, and was appointed Fellow in Drama at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 1995. For the Royal Shakespeare Company he dramatised The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1998 and Alice in Wonderland in 2001, both to widespread acclaim.

Adrian Mitchell was born in London in 1932, to a father who had survived the trenches and a mother who was a Fabian socialist whose brothers were both lost in the war. The influence of his parents on his lifelong pacifism is clear in a number of his works. Reluctantly, he did National Service in the RAF, a period of 21 months which he said confirmed his instinctive convictions of pacifism. Afterwards he resumed his education at Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied English and was taught by J. R. R. Tolkien’s son, Christopher.

After graduating he worked as a reporter at the Oxford Mail before moving to the Evening Standard in London. Subsequently he freelanced for the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Sunday Times and the New Statesman.

In June 1965 Mitchell read alongside Allen Ginsberg, the American standard-bearer of Beat generation poets, and his fellow American Gregory Corso at the original, and widely celebrated, Wholly Communion largescale poetry reading at the Albert Hall.