LES LIAISON’S IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

The New York Times

Arts & Leisure

May 4, 2008

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/theater/04hamp.html?_r=1&ref=theater&oref=slogin

 

A Writer’s New Liaison With Broadway

By JOY GOODWIN

 

AT first Christopher Hampton seems like a scribe from an earlier era: elegantly soft-spoken, with a mane of long gray hair; he writes his first drafts with a fountain pen.

 

Yet he is very much a man of the hour.

 

By his own account he has “scarcely been off a plane since August.” That’s when he began making the film festival rounds with “Atonement.” (He wrote the film’s Oscar-nominated screenplay.) Then came trips to San Francisco to tinker with his libretto for a new Philip Glass opera, “Appomattox”; to Toronto to work with the filmmaker David Cronenberg; and to France, where the director Stephen Frears is filming Mr. Hampton’s adaptation of Colette’s “Cheri.” And occasionally he dropped by London, his home base, to check on his translation of Yasmina Reza’s play “God of Carnage,” which had its premiere in March.

 

So it was striking when Mr. Hampton materialized in a cramped theater district office recently, radiating good cheer despite his jet lag. He was in New York for rehearsals of the first Broadway revival of his 1985 play, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” a hit in London before its award-winning Broadway run in 1987. The Roundabout Theater Company’s revival of this deliciously nasty drama, about a group of ancien régime aristocrats who practice sexual conquest as sport, stars Laura Linney and Ben Daniels and is directed by Rufus Norris.

 

“You do have these rare moments when everything seems to come together,” Mr. Hampton mused. “And you have to make the most of them, because they go away again.”

 

In a career that has spanned 44 of his 62 years, there have been fruitful times and fallow ones. An overnight sensation at 20 – he was the youngest playwright ever to have a show in the West End – Mr. Hampton had cemented his London reputation by the time he was 24 with a series of boldly original plays.

 

Then his theatrical agent, the legendary Peggy Ramsay, took him aside.

 

“She called me in and said, ‘You’ve got a choice, dear, now,’ ” Mr. Hampton recalled. ” ‘You can write this play over and over again for the next 40 years, and it’ll probably get a little better. Or you can do something completely different.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m thinking of writing a play about the extermination of the Brazilian Indians.’ And that set my course, really – which was to start again, every time.”

 

By his count Mr. Hampton has written more than 40 screenplays, many of them adaptations. Fourteen have been produced, including “Atonement,” “Dangerous Liaisons” (for which he won a screenwriting Oscar) and “Carrington,” which he directed. He has translated more than 20 plays, including Ms. Reza’s “Art” and a celebrated version of Chekhov’s “Seagull” that had its debut in London last year. He has written librettos for two operas as well as the book and lyrics for two Broadway musicals (“Sunset Boulevard” and the short-lived “Dracula”). And his résumé boasts a dozen plays, of which “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” is the best known.

 

Unlike many contemporary dramatists, Mr. Hampton said he enjoys doing translations and adaptations as much as originals. He traces his passion for translation to his childhood in Egypt, where “all the boys at school could speak five languages quite fluently, and I couldn’t.”

 

Trained as a linguist at Oxford, he is fascinated by the intricacies of translating – between languages, cultures, dramatic forms. His stage adaptation of “Liaisons,” written in seven jam-packed weeks at the end of 1984, demanded all the tools in his translator’s arsenal. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel is comprised entirely of decidedly untheatrical letters, many exchanged by the glittering, manipulative Madame de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Worse, the major characters are seldom assembled in the same room.

 

 

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