Lovers and Fighters: How Les Liaisons Dangereuses Reveals Christopher Hampton’s Feelings | Christopher Hampton

I Christopher Hampton, who celebrates his 80th birthday this month, was once called “the quiet man of British theatre”. By this I mean that he was less inclined to express his opinions in opinion pieces than his contemporaries such as David Hare and David Edgar. The term also indicates that his plays have a less idiosyncratic style than, say, the works of Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard. But I suspect that Hampton’s respect for the classic virtues of objectivity, clarity, and irony means that his work will prove as enduring as anyone else’s.

He is also, as I have seen, a man of great private passion. One incident in particular is etched in my memory. In November 1990, I was one of a group including director David Leveaux and set designer Bob Crowley, sent by the British Council to Cairo to give a number of talks before visiting the National Theatre. We were privileged to have a private night tour of the pyramids and were enjoying a quiet drink at the hotel next door in Giza when we were at Burst Hampton, who had just arrived from London. “Did you hear the news?” He mourned. “Mrs Thatcher has been attacked in the House of Commons by Geoffrey Howe, and appears to be in trouble.”

That was, in fact, the prelude to her resignation but what I have never forgotten was the light in Hampton’s eyes when he broke the news of her impending downfall.

This should come as no surprise when you remember that Hampton’s original plays—and I don’t have space to deal with his numerous adaptations, translations, and works in film and television—are essentially political. “I’ve always been fascinated by the tension between radicals and liberals,” he once told me. “It’s a tension that exists in all of my plays, and I think I’m resolving some conflicts within myself.”

As I re-read his major works, I was also struck by something else: that although Hampton creates vibrant female characters, his plays are as often about a conflict between two men as the works of Peter Shaffer, the author of the plays Equus and Amadeus. In Shafir, it is a battle between Apollo and Dionysus. In Hampton there is a struggle between the revolutionary and the realist.

This conflict is clearly evident in Total Eclipse, where Rimbaud’s unbridled poetic genius contrasts with Verlaine’s cautious doctrine. But what is surprising, for a writer in his early twenties, is Hampton’s ability to see both sides. Even in The Philanthropist, 1970’s novel, Hampton’s first major success, the compulsive affability of his academic hero is matched by the brutal pragmatism of the visiting novelist: In my eyes I still see Alec McQueen and Charles Gray at the premiere at the Royal Court.

While Hampton has the dramatist’s natural ability to project himself into contrasting characters, you find the balance of sympathy tipping subtly from one play to the next. In Savages, which takes on the 1973 genocide of indigenous people in Brazil, I felt that Hampton had more invested in the local revolutionaries than in the kidnapped British diplomat (played by Tom Conti and Paul Scofield, respectively). The opposite occurs in Tales from Hollywood (1983), where Hampton clearly leans more toward the liberal writer, Udon von Horvath, than toward the revolutionary Bertolt Brecht. However, when I saw the play’s Los Angeles premiere, I found myself warming to the subversive and adventurous Brecht. It is the mark of a good playwright that, by exploring his own contradictions, he can also expose the viewer’s contradictions.

Although Hampton often writes about competing male egos, it would be misleading to suggest that his women are automatically subservient. Rereading the domestic drama Treats, which I had casually rejected in 1976, I was struck by how adept the central female was at arbitrating between her rival lovers. And we all underestimated The Talking Cure when it was shown at the National in 2002. Once again the play is about the conflict between the radical and the liberal: in this case, Freud versus Jung. But what gives the work its power is its sympathetic portrayal of Sabina Spielrein, who goes from being Jung’s patient and supposed lover to Freud’s loyal follower.

Hampton’s ability to create great roles for women was confirmed by his famous version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, soon to be revived at the National. To call this adaptation is a grave disservice. This is a radical reinvention of the epistolary novel, which, in the Marquis de Merteuil’s manipulative novel, gives us one of the most frigid, devilish women in all of drama, and shows how the mathematics of seduction is ultimately undermined by the unstoppable power of love. It may be Hampton’s masterpiece, and although I’ve called him the Quiet Man, a better term is, as he enters his ninth decade, classic survivor.