Christopher Hampton's career has been marked by a chameleon's contentment to disappear in the work, writes Peter Crawley.
Recently Christopher Hampton read, in the pages of Sight & Sound, that he belonged to a peculiar set of playwrights turned screenwriters that leaves no particular stamp on their movies. Where his near-contemporaries Alan Bennett or Harold Pinter have a small but distinctive body of work in cinema, the article contended, Hampton's films abandoned the defining idiosyncrasies of his plays. Hampton, a tall, spry fellow with shoulder-length silver hair, seemed to take it on the chin. In fact, he was inclined to agree. After all, through the 40 years of his professional life as a writer, translator, adapter and film director, Hampton's most defining characteristic has been, paradoxically, his self-effacement.
"It was a strategy right from the beginning," he says, sitting snug in the corner of a green sofa in his beautiful, bright office in Notting Hill. "I never wanted to try to limit myself; for my plays to be 'Hampton plays'. I was very interested in the idea of finding a specific style for each different piece of work. In a way, I suppose White Chameleon is a particularly revealing play, because it's the one play where I was totally autobiographical."
A self-portrait of the artist as a young boy, trying to disappear into the background of Egypt before the Suez crisis, Hampton's 1991 play displayed the development of his writing persona: a coolly detached observer. Although Hampton had smuggled himself into his early plays - from his hugely successful debut in 1966, When Did You Last See My Mother? (staged on the West End when he was still an Oxford undergraduate) to the affable, befuddled protagonist of The Philanthropist four years later - Hampton quickly tired of being put centre stage.
"You tended to come back again with less and less energy every time," he recalls. "Therefore, you had to find some other strategy where you could go back to square one every time really. That's what I try and do: start again every time."
One method of beginning anew, and a consistent strand of Hampton's career, has been to find the drama in the lives and works of other artists. His second play, Total Eclipse, a dramatisation of the destructive relationship between the French Symbolist poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, was a study in creativity and genius.
"The thing about writing plays," he says, "is that you become attracted to a subject and you never quite know why. It tends to reveal itself while you're doing it. I guess at some point I realised that Total Eclipse was about what it meant to be a writer and what the possibilities were."
Given the precocity and brilliance of the young Rimbaud, compared to the sturdy professionalism of the older Verlaine, Hampton initially had more affinity with the former. But his attitude changed, he says, while writing it.
"When I started the play the impulse to write it was a worship of Rimbaud," he says. "By the time I finished the play I was leaning more towards Verlaine. In a way it was a more honourable life. It was a writer's life, whereas Rimbaud's was an adventurer's life."
HAMPTON'S PROFESSIONAL LIFE has been somewhere between the two. His precocious beginnings seemed to make him suspicious of success, treating it with the transience of a fatalist.
Early in his career, as literary manager of the Royal Court, Hampton used to tell his long-time friend and then assistant David Hare that they could expect to last no more than 10 years in their profession. ("My observation was that a playwright's career was rarely longer than that.")
When his fourth play, Treats, opened to scathing reviews in 1976, Hampton decided his decade was up. He continued working on translations for the stage - most notably of Ibsen, Chekhov and Ödön Von Horváth - but decided to divine a new path in cinema.
Moving to the country, he began work on Carrington, an adaptation of Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey, before setting out for Hollywood - going back to square one. "It was very healing actually," he recalls of the year invested in writing Carrington. "The disadvantage was that by the time I handed it in, the studio had no memory of having commissioned it." Little came of his three months in Hollywood, divided between limos, lavish hotels, expense accounts and fruitless meetings, but he didn't return to London disappointed. The seeds of Tales From Hollywood, arguably his theatrical masterpiece, were sown in LA, his own displacement funnelled into the story of exiled European intellectuals in wartime Hollywood. It would be almost 20 years, however, before Carrington would get the green light.
It almost didn't happen. At the last minute director Mike Newell, then fresh from Four Weddings and a Funeral, dropped out. Hampton finally yielded to invitations to direct the film himself, aided only by a crash course and a book entitled First Steps in Directing. By the end of it, the film received two awards at Cannes - one for Jonathan Pryce's portrayal of Strachey and the other in recognition of Hampton's directorial debut.
Numerous awards peek out irrepressibly from the shelves of Hampton's study: the Oscar and Bafta he received for his Dangerous Liaisons screenplay, the Tony award for his work on Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, Sunset Boulevard, a clutch of others. They used to occupy more discreet nooks he tells me, almost apologetically, but have been moved to prominent positions by his daughter. His Oscar - "the gold bugger" - has a way of asserting itself.
Directing changed Hampton's life. "I just felt very liberated by the knowledge that it was not an impossible task," he says. He has since directed two more films, The Secret Agent and Imagining Argentina. The latter, released in 2004, was again a labour of love, taking 14 years to see the light of a projector, before being critically mauled for its controversial blend of political horror and magic realism.
"The mistake was to suppose that people would somehow understand that the magic realism side of it was a metaphor," he says. "The film proposes that the power of the imagination is the only weapon you have in those sort of circumstances. In the end there was no logical reason for those people [ the Galtieri regime] not to still be in power, except that they were somehow thought out of office."
The writer's luxury of detachment may not seem like a happy fit with the commanding stance of the film director, but Hampton entertains its analogies. "As a director your job is to interpret this into that in the same way that if you adapt a book for the cinema or the stage you're moving something from one medium to another. I suppose some of the same processes pertain."
Given Hampton's facility with language - he graduated from Oxford with a first in French and German - one wonders if his transition was made easier by his capacity to learn the grammar of each medium, to quickly understand the syntax of different narratives.
"Well I haven't really thought of it like that, but, yeah, that sounds about right actually. I think it is a series of codes. Different people are attuned to different areas and everything slots together, which is analogous to a language. But I don't know. I don't even know if I'm a good film director, I just know that I like it."
IN FACT HAMPTON, whose meteoric early success in theatre has been matched by the tireless determination of his film career (he has up to 20 film scripts that remain unmade), holds such affection for the cinema that it can trouble his stage colleagues. Though he recently returned to the stage with The Talking Cure, based on the deteriorating friendship of Freud and Jung, the play actually started life as a failed film script for Julia Roberts. David Hare has never been slow to voice his concerns: "We lost Christopher to the cinema," he once remarked unhappily.
"He gets anxious about me," laughs Hampton, "which is very sweet of him. But I'm afraid I'm always doing what I feel like. I can see it irritates some people - not David - but there's nothing I can do about it really. I discovered early on that you can't predict what's going to work and what's not going to work, so you may as well do what emotionally engages you at any given moment. And you're bound to have failures and go down side roads that you probably shouldn't go down, but it's much more interesting than trying to build a career."
Now that he has reached 60, however, Hampton has made the uncharacteristic decision to plan out the next 10 years - and the theatre, he affirms, is again his central project. There are four plays he intends to write, beginning with White Moghuls, based on William Dalrymple's novel, for the National Theatre. Screenwriting, he admits, has come to involve more and more compromises: "It's gotten harder to maintain one's own independent position on a big enterprise."
His film commitments continue to stack up, however. Currently he is working on an adaptation of Susanna Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and a screenplay about Iva Tagori, the "Tokyo Rose" falsely imprisoned in the US for treason after the second World War - a subject he considers "very relevant for right now", but which, like so much of his overlooked political work, may be a struggle to see produced.
Today he is waiting, with some excitement, to see the first cut of Atonement, his adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel. "I think it's been a real advantage not to be particularly ambitious," he says, a wry summation of a career that has been marked as much by its diffidence as its extraordinary diversity, and the chameleon's contentment to disappear in the work. "I don't feel that any of this has come out of ambition, except to live the life I wanted to live - maybe that is quite ambitious - and to write the stuff I wanted to write."
There will be a public interview with Christopher Hampton tomorrow at the Irish Film Institute, following a 5.30pm screening of his film, Carrington, as part of the Arts Council's Critical Voices 3 programme. Booking: Irish Film Institute (01-6795744, e-mail hampton@irishfilm.ie). Tickets are free, but places must be reserved
