Keeping his distance

Christopher Hampton is fascinated by 'people blithely driving towards a precipice'. He talks to PETER CRAWLEYabout writing for theatre, a 'present tense art'

IT WAS NOT the first time that Christopher Hampton had followed in another writer’s footsteps. As a playwright, filmmaker, translator and adaptor, Hampton had already delivered modern and smoothly accessible new versions of Ibsen, Ödön von Horváth and Molière, among many others, a process he contentedly describes as “spending two months closeted with a masterpiece”.

But when he visited the Yalta home of Anton Chekhov last year, Hampton, who had translated The Seagull, Three Sistersand Uncle Vanya, felt somehow closer to the great Russian dramatist. "It was an incredibly moving thing," says Hampton, a man who does not bow easily to sentiment.

Chekhov had bought this resort town house to recuperate from his chronic tuberculosis, but never did, and planted 150 trees on its grounds, now so tall they eclipse the house from view. Inside, it is so carefully preserved that one can imagine Chekhov has just stepped out of the room. “It’s very touching being there,” says Hampton, as though tracing the adaptor’s familiar conundrum: how can you be intimately familiar with someone on the other side of an unbridgeable distance? Then again, that tension always seems to have served Hampton well.

“What I like about Chekhov is that he combines a sense of standing back with a sense of involvement” says Hampton, “If you say that the Brecht equation is that the audience have to stand back, it seems to me only half the equation. I don’t see any reason why the audience shouldn’t stand back and be even more moved because they realise that they’re not being manipulated.”

In some way, that is the starting point for much of what Hampton does; his writing persona has long been considered one of cool detachment. "I'm very emotionally involved in everything I do," he says, "but I strive to keep that distance. Because I think the audience will feel it more authentically if they don't feel worked upon." Hampton's early work was discreetly autobiographical and astonishingly precocious: his first play, a subversive tale of awakening sexuality called When Did You Last See My Mother?, opened in the West End when he was just 20. His subsequent works cemented his poise and wit, with Total Eclipse, a study of the destructive relationship between French Symbolist poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, subtly investigating his own possibilities as a writer. His later play White Chameleonwas uncharacteristically revealing: a self-portrait of the artist as a young boy, trying to disappear into the background of Egypt before the Suez crisis hit.

“The Suez crisis was very formative, I’m sure,” says Hampton, who fled Egypt with his family, at the age of 10, on the last boat. “And I suppose it’s very useful for a writer to have been somehow dumped outside the wall, to then have to make your way on your own steam, never to be settled.”

Hampton has always been fascinated by “people blithely driving towards a precipice”, or any society that assumes its circumstances will never change: Russian intelligentsia, Nazi Germany, pre-revolutionary France. “I think that’s very interesting,” he says, “to what extent people’s blindness is wilful, and to what extent it’s just blindness. What could be more like that then the ex-pat situation before Suez? I mean, those people thought that the sun rose and set on the British Empire. Then suddenly the British Empire was over in a matter of weeks.”

Betrayal, the corruption of innocence and constant battles all feature in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the 18th-century epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, which Hampton first read as a language student in Oxford. "It seemed to me at the age I read it, and it still seems to me now, to tell the truth," he says. "It's very truthful in a quite painful way about certain eternal verities."

But Hampton was compelled as much by its tone, remarkably free from frivolity or sentimentality, detailing the lurid and cynical exploits of the libertine Valmont and the vicious duplicitous Mme de Merteuil with dispassion.

“I think that’s another thing that attracts me. I think dispassion is there, but it does not preclude emotion, it does not preclude a tragic feeling about what’s going on.”

For many, Les Liaisons Dangereusesand its 1988 film version, Dangerous Liaisons, will be their main reference for Christopher Hampton, whose great accomplishments, such as Tales From Hollywoodare not revived so frequently, and whose films, such as Carrington– a labour of love that he directed and took 20 years to develop – are not so mainstream. Paradoxically, he is now recognised as a brilliant adaptor, a job which, if done brilliantly, is hard to recognise. Is the adaptor's art a self-effacing one? "It ought to be," he says. "Though it depends on what's on the label in a way. When Tom Stoppard did those Nestroy adaptations, he played with them. They're Tom Stoppard plays that were almost accidentally written by Nestroy. On the other hand, if you do a piece that you feel for and have admiration for, you just want to do the best for it you possibly can. With The Seagullwhat you need to do is try to work out what exactly Chekhov had in mind, then present it and get the f**k out of the way."

In the early days of the Royal National Theatre, Tom Stoppard joked with Hampton, “If they like you, they’ll offer to commission a play. If they don’t like you but think they ought to, they’ll offer you a translation.” In due course, Hampton was offered a translation of Marivaux, who remains one of the few writers with whom he can find no common ground. (Pirandello and Lorca are others.)

He counter-proposed Les Liaisons Dangereuses, but they were baffled by a book in which the main characters never meet. Years later, the Royal Shakespeare Society offered him an open commission and he delivered Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which they staged after some reluctance in 1985, to rave reviews and just 23 sold out performances. It took the intervention of an eccentric theatre producer, however, to bring it to the West End, where it ran for 1,500 performances.

GETTING THE FILM OFF THEground was a nightmare; the project eventually fell to a television company that was steadily going bankrupt and a director, Stephen Frears, who was then relatively unknown and found itself in a race against Milos Forman's rival adaptation, Valmont. "I wrote it with blood coming out of my ears," recalls Hampton, who produced the screenplay in three weeks. The film, starring John Malkovich, Glenn Close and Uma Thurman, was shot, edited and released within six months and went on to win the Bafta and Oscar for Hampton's screenplay. "And the film exists," he says. "Which it shouldn't. Sometimes the gods are with you. Most often they're not."

Indeed, Hampton has 30 unproduced screenplays in his wardrobe, and still his friend and colleague David Hare, never slow to voice his concerns, once unhappily remarked: "We lost Christopher to the cinema." Why does he do it? "You go into cinema with the same spirit as entering a casino; hoping to win," he reflects. "And when you do win, as with Dangerous Liaisonsor as with Atonement, then it's enormously satisfying. It reaches a vast audience. But most of the time the ball falls in the wrong hole and the chips are swept away." Hare had also worried that Hampton's talents had been eclipsed in the service of other, sometimes lesser writers. Hampton considers the point sombrely.

"I'm familiar with his position on this. But I think the business of having an audience in a building for two hours and having them go out of the building thinking they've had a good, interesting and instructive time is so difficult, no matter whose name is on the tin . . .". He trails off, uncharacteristically, thinks for a moment and continues. "I guess looking back I probably have spent too much time not being able to resist doing this that and the other." When this year of commitments is over, he says, which includes a stage adaptation of All About Eve, a screenplay adaptation of his own play The Talking Curefor David Cronenberg, and a film adaptation of Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherlandfor Sam Mendes, he is declining further offers. "I've got about half a dozen plays I want to write," he says, "and I'd better get on and do them. Because time marches on." Some of these are about writers, in a similar vein to Total Eclipseand Tales From Hollywood. Others are comedies, like The Philanthropist."Just things that I've been mulling," he says. "I feel the time has come to stop mulling."

The one constant in Hampton’s writing, whether original or adaptation, film or theatre, is that it is destined for performance. He wrote one novel, at the age of 16, whose last known whereabouts was the office of his departed and formidable agent, Peggy Ramsay. “It’s not all bad, dear,” she assured him when a fire had reduced her archives to cinders. “Your book went up!” “Writing is always very lonely,” he says. “That’s why it’s nice to work in the theatre. As you get older and less defensive, the process of collaboration gets better.”

He may have sworn off attending German productions of his work (the final straw was a recent production of Les Liaisons Dangereueses in Berlin, in which the actors all wore rabbit costumes), but he still attends productions that intrigue him. He has even written new lines for Michael Barker Caven’s new production at the Gate, the theatre that staged the play first in 1988.

Even working alone, though, Hampton agrees that much like touring the office of Anton Chekhov, an adaptor may feel there is another person in the room.

De Laclos was such a companion and Hampton’s programme note approvingly quotes the writer’s intention to create something “out of the ordinary, eye-catching, something that would resound around the world even after I had left it”. “It’s a typical remark by an unpublished writer,” Hampton laughs.

“I guess I felt that way when I started, more than I do now. As time goes on you realise that that’s not important. Especially in theatre, which is really a present tense art.”

Some works continue to resound, however, the result of a collaboration across geography and history, with the names De Laclos and Hampton now forever combined.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, directed by Michael Barker-Caven, runs at the Gate, Dublin, until Apr 24 at 7.30pm