A Dangerous Liaison
With a practised artistic frown, Christopher Hampton gazes with a mixture of love, longing and fear through the window of Magdalen Summer Common Room and across the quad, into the room which once was the site of his tutorials. As his honey-like voice trickles gently through the air, his talents as a writer are apparent. The fear is induced by memories of turning up to his tutorials week after week without an essay: "In the end, he told me just to stop coming!" Hampton is talking about his Philology tutor, who was the inspiration for the main character in the first of his plays to show on Broadway, The Philanthropist.
Although he confesses that to be a successful writer, you don't have to have an interesting life yourself, his history is far from dreary. Born in the Azores in 1946 and living in Aden, Egypt and Zanzibar as a child, he moved to England after leaving Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956, where his parents thought it best for him to stay despite later returning to Egypt themselves. He talks of the "outsiderdom" he felt just after moving to England, a factor he recognises as being indispensable to his writing: a sense of not quite being able to engage with the people around him 100 per cent, trying to epitomise what it was to be a young Englishman in the rigid society of the 1960s, and all the time knowing it was just a façade: "It turns out to have been extremely useful."
In 1966 he went to New College, Oxford to study German and French after sending the manuscript of his first literary venture, a novel, to every literary agent he could think of and collecting nothing but a large pile of rejection slips from it. He knew he wanted to be a writer from an early age, and had written his first play before he came up to Oxford. Not knowing what to do with it, he left it in a drawer and came up to university. It was a fortunate move: during Hampton's time at Oxford, a competition to find and put on the best plays written by undergraduates began - the forerunner of the New Writing Festival, which is on this week. He laughs at the original winners of this competition: a musical (said with disgust) and a play written by an Algerian student about the political hardships in Algeria. However, the musical proved too costly to produce and the Algerian, who was also playing the lead role, was stricken by measles the week before the performance, so the festival of undergraduate drama ended up consisting of Hampton's first play, When Did You Last See My Mother.
The performance was attended by the Guardian's local correspondent, who gave it a sparkling review in the national newspaper. He began looking for an agent, and was awoken one morning in early summer by a knock on his window from the porter. "I thought someone had died - they never come and fetch you for a phonecall," said Hampton. It was in fact Peggy Ramsay, who was to become his agent and who told him he had "better come to London then. Tomorrow." When he arrived in London, after taking a huge handful of five pound notes from her handbag to ask if he needed any money (Hampton replied: "No thanks, I've got my day return."), Ramsay had his play put on at the Royal Court Theatre and Hampton took a year out to immerse himself in theatre before returning to Oxford. "I never had the sensation of my peers knowing what had happened," he admits with more than a hint of relief, since many of them had graduated after his year out, and in his final year he lived at the Maison Française. At that time the Maison Française was inhabited solely by undergraduates and was visited by many eminent French guests - among them Jean Renoir and the infamous mime artist Marcel Marceau: "He was very talkative," Hampton adds with a dry laugh.
Dressed as many a man of his age and sophistication in a stylish but plain black shirt and trousers, Hampton oozes unwitting self-confidence, understandable having enjoyed success not only as a playwright, but also for his translations, as a screenwriter for large and small screen films and more recently as a film director. Yet despite his success, he seems somewhat surprised and amused by his own life, admitting to having "slalomed" into his theatrical career with "preposterous fortune".
Since his undergraduate days Hampton has written many plays, such as Tales from Hollywood and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which he adapted into an Oscar-winning film.
The accomplished writer seems very much at home against the powder blue walls, antique gold fittings and grand fireplaces of the Summer Common Room, relaxing in his chair and occasionally glancing again towards the quad. He is perfectly serene, yet still full of energy, his golden books-on-tape tones and flowing hand gestures occasionally interrupted by bursts of laughter and sharp finger-snaps, with the sunlight catching his watch and long silver hair. He smiles at the irony of rejecting the proposal of school friends Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice: after shunning a musical based on Phantom of the Opera as "an awful idea", he then went on to write the lyrics and dialogue for Sunset Boulevard, now a masterpiece which has been selling out at theatres for many many years.
To Hampton there is a certain fulfilment to be gained from writing screenplay and directing films that cannot be gained from the theatre: "A video or a DVD is like a paperback book: it is a finished object, there upon the shelf and no amount of deleted scenes and director's commentary can change it. A play is a living organism." He ponders on whether or not he has the patience to direct for the stage; to work through a play over and over in rehearsal, see the actors explore dead-end pathways of character to eventually reach the best interpretation without the fear of them never quite understanding the people he has created in his head and on the page. "The writer has such a lack of control over the performance of his own plays," believes Hampton; there are so many extraneous factors that can mould the end product into something a little different from what he originally envisaged, not least "the temperamental nature of directors and who the lead actor is sleeping with." But with a certain air of satisfaction and a wry smile he adds: "Nevertheless, there's nothing like it."
Christopher Hampton's translation of Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov will be showing at the Oxford
Playhouse in 8th week.
26th Feb 2004