Hampton on Hampton by Christopher Hampton

Author:Christopher Hampton [Alistair Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571341467
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2017-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

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White Chameleon – Sunset Boulevard – Dracula – Alice’s Adventures Under Ground

Before embarking on White Chameleon, you’d always avoided autobiography. What prompted you to dramatize this part of your life?

It’s strange how the origin of these things is often so different from the end result. In this case, it started with a bright idea by Richard Eyre when he first took over at the National. He knew about my childhood in Egypt, so he proposed that I write a play about the Suez Crisis and that David Hare write a play about the Hungarian Uprising, and that both plays be done in 1991, the thirty-fifth anniversary of those events.

Because the Hungarian Uprising happened at the same time as the Suez Crisis, and the Russians used the distraction caused by Suez to put down the Hungarians?

Exactly. In 1956. So David went to eastern Europe, and I started reading books and looking at newsreels about Suez. But David couldn’t draw together his material into a play, and the more I studied mine the more I thought, ‘I’m not very interested in writing about Suez, because everyone knows that it was a callous and stupid adventure, all about flexing muscles which Britain no longer had, and what else can you say except that?’ And, of course, the more I thought about that, the more I remembered my own relationship with Egypt, which seemed to be something I kept coming back to and was interested in exploring. I thought that it raised larger issues than just personal issues – issues which, as it happens, have fed pretty consistently into my work – and I could see that it would make a viable play. So I put that idea to Richard instead, and when he eventually read it he said that he liked it very much and wanted to direct it.

Did you find it more difficult to write than your other plays?

I did, actually. Writing it took a lot out of me, even though my memory is that it didn’t take more than a couple of weeks, and watching it took a lot out of me, in a way that I don’t think any of my other plays have. But there was something positive about being affected that deeply, so the whole experience was a very valuable one. It seems to me that, every five years or so, you have to have some galvanizing experience within your profession to give you the energy you need to go on with it, and the filming of Liaisons was one of them and this, five years later, was another. If you produce a lot of work, as I’ve tended to in recent years, you’re always doing it half in the hope of having one of these energizing experiences, but you can’t plan in advance what’s going to affect you deeply and what isn’t.

So there were emotional difficulties; what about technical difficulties? You’re usually scrupulously accurate when dealing with factual events, for example.

This was a different process, and the

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