Christopher Hampton – författare

Four short plays for young actors Making Scenes 1 is an exciting selection of plays commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for the BT National Connections festival for young actors in 1995.Each play includes Production Notes, dealing with setting and staging, costume, lighting and casting. Also included are a set of questions and exercises for workshop classes.

With the Austro-Hungarian dramatist Ödön von Horváth as our guide, Christopher Hampton's witty and erudite play takes us on a tour of the sun-soaked boulevards of 1940s Los Angeles. Taking in such improbable residents as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht and the Marx Brothers amongst others, it brilliantly serves to open up a neglected chapter of American cultural history, as the wry and embittered European émigrés find themselves amidst the materialistic razzle-dazzle of Hollywood.Tales from Hollywood premiered at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre, Los Angeles, 1982 and at the National Theatre, London, in 1983.

This first collection of Hampton's work includes The Philanthropist, which premièred at the Royal Court Theatre in 1970 and went on to become one of the Court's longest-running West End transfers. The volume also contains Treats, Savages and Hampton's deeply affecting drama about the relationship of the French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, Total Eclipse.

'A lot of my plays begin as comedies and mutate in the course of the evening, because my instinct is that you have to welcome the audience in and make sure they're sitting comfortably before you can give them an adequate punch on the jaw.'Since the acclaimed London première of his first play in 1966, Christopher Hampton has established himself as one of Britain's most prominent, and least predictable, dramatists.From his best-known play, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and its Oscar-winning film version, Dangerous Liaisons, to personal and critical favourites like Total Eclipse and Tales from Hollywood; from his films as writer-director (Carrington, Imagining Argentina) to his work as screenwriter-for-hire (Mary Reilly, The Quiet American); from translations (Art) to musicals (Sunset Boulevard), Hampton eloquently - and entertainingly - explores his varied career with interviewer Alistair Owen, and discusses its recurring theme: the clash of liberal and radical thought, exemplified by his most recent play, The Talking Cure, about the fathers of psychoanalysis, Jung and Freud.

Christopher Hampton's The Talking Cure deals with the early years of C.G. Jung, and his decision to experiment, using Freud's controversial new method of psychoanalysis, with a young Russian patient, Sabine Spielrein. The success of the experiment and the blossoming of his relationship with Sabine inaugurates, haunts and ultimately poisons Jung's friendship with Freud; and the ideas and conflicts which engulf the three of them embody, as Jung comes to realize, the destructive forces which are to overwhelm the disastrous century ahead.The Talking Cure premiered at the National Theatre, London, in December 2002.

The Prime Minister and his cabinet have been assassinated and England's most treasured writers are being murdered one by one. Back at the university, a bachelor don anguishes over sex, marriage, anagrams and the meaning of life.Written as a response to Molière's The Misanthrope and first performed at the Royal Court in 1970, this biting 'bourgeois comedy' examines the empty, insular lives of college intellectuals.The Philanthropist was revived at the Donmar Warehouse in September 2005.'Intellectually stimulating, touchingly sympathetic and gloriously, gloriously funny.' Sunday Times

4th March, 1865: On the night of his second inauguration, a few weeks before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln meets the veteran black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the White House to discuss the prospect of extending the vote to black men who have served in the soon to be victorious Union armies.4th March, 1965: In the White House, Lyndon Johnson, anxious to introduce a new Voting Rights Act, is briefed by his sinister and "unfirable" FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, on the imminent Selma to Montgomery march, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. It is a demonstration prompted by a state trooper's murder of the young activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, in Marion, Alabama, following a rally in support of voter registration in Perry County.In his ambitious new play, commissioned by the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis as the centrepiece of a retrospective of his plays and films, Christopher Hampton traces a line which runs from the last days of a brutal Civil War to the high-water mark of the Civil Rights movement and on, all the way to the present day; and considers the agonisingly slow healing of a wound, universal, but especially deep and painful in America: racism.Appomattox premiered at the McGuire Proscenium Stage in the Guthrie Theater on 5 October, 2012.

Stephen Ward charts the rise and fall from grace of the man at the centre of the Profumo Scandal. Friend to film stars, spies, models, government ministers and aristocrats, his rise and ultimate disgrace coincided with the increasingly permissive lifestyle of London's elite in the early 1960s.Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, with book and lyrics by Christopher Hampton and Don Black, centres on Ward's involvement with the young and beautiful Christine Keeler, which led to one of the biggest political scandals and most famous trials of the twentieth century.Stephen Ward premiered at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in December 2013.

The scandalous reputation of Laclos's novel, first published in 1782, is based on its chilling portrayal of the mannered decadence and sexual cynicism of the French aristocracy in the last years of the ancien regime. Christopher Hampton has made a masterful adaptation for the stage of the conspiracy to corrupt a young girl barely out of her convent.Les liaisons dangereuses was premiered by Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 24 September 1985, and won Christopher Hampton the Evening Standard Award for Best Play and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 1986.

French billionaire Orgon, relocated to Los Angeles with his family, has fallen under the spell of Tartuffe, a radical American evangelist. So comprehensively is he hoodwinked that Tartuffe looks set to steal his fortune, drive away his son, seduce his wife and marry his daughter.Molière's classic comedy, adapted by Christopher Hampton and directed by the former dramaturg of the French People's National Theatre, Gérald Garutti, premiered in May 2018, the West End's first dual language theatre production.This is a bilingual edition of the text.

I had no idea what was going on. Or very little. No more than most people. So you can't make me feel guilty.Brunhilde Pomsel's life spanned the twentieth century. She struggled to make ends meet as a secretary in Berlin during the 1930s, her many employers including a Jewish insurance broker, the German Broadcasting Corporation and, eventually, Joseph Goebbels. Christopher Hampton's play is based on the testimony she gave when she finally broke her silence to a group of Austrian filmmakers, shortly before she died in 2016. Maggie Smith, alone on stage, plays Brunhilde Pomsel. Christopher Hampton's play is drawn from the testimony Pomsel gave when she finally broke her silence shortly before she died to a group of Austrian filmmakers, and from their documentary A German Life (Christian Krönes, Olaf Müller, Roland Schrotthofer and Florian Weigensamer, produced by Blackbox Film & Media Productions).

The old man started to talk about the trial. He blamed everyone involved, including the teacher, i.e. me. In his view the root cause of the problem was that everybody involved - teachers, parents, boys - behaved as if God no longer existed. A schoolteacher is denounced and accused of 'sabotage of the Fatherland' when he reprimands a student for making a racist remark. The class petition against him. A murder follows. During the trial, the teacher decides to risk everything by telling the truth. Published in 1937, Jugend Ohne Gott is the penultimate novel by Ödön von Horváth. It was judged by Thomas Mann to be the best novel of recent years. This powerful evocation of everyday life in the shadow of fascism also garnered praise from Hermann Hesse, Franz Werfel and Joseph Roth, who called Horváth 'the most clear-sighted chronicler of his age'.Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Youth Without God was commissioned by and performed in Vienna at the Theater in der Josefstadt in 2009. On its tenth anniversary, the play receives its UK premiere at The Coronet Theatre, London.

The new edition of Christopher Hampton's renowned adaptation, revised and with a new introduction for the play's fortieth anniversary.'One of the best stage adaptations ever written.' OBSERVERYou see, I have no intention of breaking down her prejudices. I want her to believe in God and virtue and the sanctity of marriage, and still not be able to stop herself. I want passion, in other words. Not the kind we're used to, which is as cold as it's superficial, I don't get much pleasure out of that any more. No. I want the excitement of watching her betray everything that's most important to her.Former lovers, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont now compete in games of seduction and revenge. At the play's dark heart is their conspiracy to corrupt Cécile, a young girl barely out of her convent.Adapted from Choderlos de Laclos's scandalous epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses opened at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1985. The play was revived at the National Theatre, London, in March 2026.