Christopher Hampton interview: I never write plays telling you what to think
In 2012, the British playwright Christopher Hampton saw a play by a then little-known French writer in Paris and loved it so much he volunteered to translate it into English. The director Laurence Boswell put it on at Bath’s tiny Ustinov theatre in 2014 and the following year it transferred to the West End before embarking on a UK tour.
Last year, a film version, adapted by Hampton and its author Florian Zeller, and starring Anthony Hopkins as an elderly man lost to dementia, won two Oscars and two Baftas, including two for adapted screenplay. “When we tried to move the play to London, a lot of people told us they weren’t sure if anyone would want to see this sort of thing’,” says Hampton. “So to see it win at the Baftas in particular was extremely sweet.”
The play, of course, is The Father and such has been its success here and that of subsequent Zeller plays translated by Hampton, including The Mother, The Son and The Height of the Storm, that Zeller is premiering his latest, The Forest, not in France but in London. Starring Toby Stephens and directed by Jonathan Kent, it features two married men having affairs, and, as is typical of Zeller, combines simple language with a structure so slippery it takes on the disorientating logic of a dream. “Zeller makes you a participant, not just a spectator,” says Hampton. “I’ve written this one in quite a Pinterish way; Zeller loves English theatre. And he really likes English actors, which is one of the reasons he is putting it on here.”
Hampton has been a Francophile ever since a teacher at his public school, Lancing College, persuaded him to read German and French at Oxford rather than English, telling him, “you’ll read the English classics anyway so you may as well open yourself up to two other cultures”. (Hampton is best known for his 1985 play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which won him a best adapted screenplay Oscar in 1989.)
Yet his felicity as a linguist arguably started when he was a child, living in Egypt and attending an international school where “everyone spoke at least five languages”, forcing him to learn a smattering of Arabic and French. And it stood him in good stead after university, when he landed a job working on English translations of plays by Isaac Babel and Chekhov at the Royal Court, despite not understanding Russian. By this point, still only in his early twenties, he was already a big success – his first play When Did You Last See My Mother?, written when he was an undergraduate, had been seized upon by agent extraordinaire Peggy Ramsey, who “bulldozed” the Court into putting it on in 1964. “Early success is always confusing – you don’t know how to adjust to it,” says Hampton. “But Peggy said, ‘If you want a long career you have to just keep working and accept there will be failures as well as success’. It proved good advice.”
Indeed it did. Now 76, Hampton has been working steadily for five decades, deftly combining translating and adapting with original plays and screenplays (and with hits and failures along the way). His white, shoulder-length hair and penchant for polka dot lend him a raffish air, but in person he is quietly spoken and unassuming.
Professionally speaking, he is the most dazzling and least showy of playwrights, preferring erudite, amused detachment over ostentatious pyrotechnics, his stage hits including the bourgeois comedy The Philanthropist (1970), Tales from Hollywood (1982), about European emigres in 1940s Los Angeles, and, of course, the scintillating Les Liaisons Dangereuses. But he has also always been hard to place, rebutting the “violently” politicised aesthetic at the Court, where his contemporaries included schoolfriend David Hare (the two remain close) and, later, writers such as David Edgar, Howard Brenton and Caryl Churchill. “I was always conscious my plays were at odds with the agenda in the Seventies,” he says. “I didn’t ever want to be writing plays that told people how to think. [I wanted] to allow people to make up their own minds, one way or another.”
Not that Hampton, who lives in Kensington, west London, with his wife of 50 years Laura de Holesch and has two grown-up children, has avoided political subjects. His monologue A German Life, based on testimony by Goebbels’s secretary Brunhilde Pomsel and starring Maggie Smith, was one of the hits of 2019.
Populism and intolerance greatly interest him. “There’s this odd disconnect at the moment where a majority can vote for people who make Nixon look rather moderate, yet where, if you say the wrong thing, you might never work again.”
Does he worry about saying the wrong thing? Hampton has the demeanour of one rarely troubled by anything, but he admits he feels the range of subjects one can write about is now constricted. He’s been trying to find a home for a reworked version of his epic play Appomattox, about Lyndon Johnson’s struggle to pass a voting rights bill in the 1960s, and which was staged in America in 2012, “but I don’t get the sense that anyone wants to do it here. I’m an old white man talking about racial issues. But maybe there are other voices that can tell that story from a more interesting perspective.”
Moreover, he was stung by criticism that his recent ITV adaptation of JG Farrell’s 1978 novel The Singapore Grip, set during the 1942 Japanese invasion, was too “colonial”. “No one could be more anti-colonial than Farrell,” he says. “You get the feeling these criticisms come from pure ignorance really. But that’s the deal. I was a bit upset, but not unduly.”
What does upset him is English insularity. “I do think English audiences are pretty lazy when it comes to European work. There was a series of magnificent Russian plays at the National during the 1990s which gained big audiences, but these days there is a trend towards less adventurous programming, which is a shame.”
Does the National have a greater obligation to revive more foreign plays, and more classics? “Yes. And not because they can be manipulated in the direction of a thesis but simply because they are great plays.” He agrees there is an increasing pressure these days for storytelling to justify itself. “[The Half of a Yellow Sun author] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lamented the other day that literature was now reduced to writers manoeuvring themselves into the most admired position. I thought, ‘Yes’. If, as an audience, what you’re watching or reading doesn’t allow you autonomy then it’s not going to nourish you in any way.”
As a writer, Hampton prefers to keep himself concealed. “I’m with Flaubert when he talks about the importance of the absence of the author’s personality.” That said, he has just completed a screenplay based on the moment his family was forced to leave Egypt by boat in the middle of the night at the height of the Suez crisis (he was 10) and is looking to get it made. “It’s a rare detour into autobiography for me.” His disinterest in personal experience is partly what makes him such a fine adapter, of course. And a writer with such a long career. He smiles wryly. “It’s possible that a genuine interest in what’s outside yourself is a sustaining thing.”
‘The Forest’ is at Hampstead Theatre, London NW3, from Monday February 14; hampsteadtheatre.com
