Sunday, June 30, 2024

Playwright Christopher Hampton: ‘What really happened is more interesting than what people invent’

  Playwright Christopher Hampton: ‘What really happened is more interesting than what people invent’ 


His new work ‘Visit from an Unknown Woman’ deals with sexual obsession at a time of political turmoil


Considering there are under two hours to go before a preview of his latest play, Christopher Hampton seems remarkably relaxed. With his floaty white hair and beard, he has the serene air of a guru or a benign wizard as he takes tea and cake unnoticed in the busy foyer of Hampstead Theatre. Then again, the playwright, director, translator and librettist has had enough successes in his long career — garnering several Oscars and Baftas — not to get stressed about a new London opening.

The enigmatic Visit from an Unknown Woman, adapted from a 1922 novella by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, has been long in its gestation — about 25 years ago, he suggested to Andrew Lloyd Webber they turn it into a musical, though the composer wasn’t convinced.
“It’s just two people” was Lloyd Webber’s objection — not optimal for a musical. In the story, the woman and man are unnamed, and the woman does not even appear in person. A successful writer returns home, picks up the long letter that provides the bulk of the story and reflects on its contents in the final paragraph. The unknown woman has made a declaration of exorbitant, life-long adoration. But despite several trysts over the years, the man simply cannot recall her face. Hampton has opened up the story for the stage, dramatising encounters that are merely narrated in the text.
A woman wearing a drab grey dress standing in profile by a door
Natalie Simpson in Christopher Hampton’s ‘Visit from an Unknown Woman’ © Marc Brenner
“The character is a sort of blank page [in the Zweig story], so you don’t really get much sense of what he’s like. It’s really all about her obsession with him. It’s a pretty strange syndrome that she’s suffering from. It’s a kind of study of fan obsession. I’ve moved it forward [in time] and indeed I’ve made him a Jewish writer — I’ve made him Stefan Zweig.”
To me, the male character comes across as a seducer and a gaslighter, so it is surprising to hear that there are grounds for it being a self-portrait. “Stefan Zweig was famous for having an enormous number of girlfriends,” Hampton says. “He always kept a bachelor flat in Vienna, and Friderike, the woman he married, was a kind of groupie. The one thing in the story that I personally find very hard to believe is that you would have had a sexual relationship with someone that you couldn’t remember. I think that must have happened to Zweig.” It’s the sort of detail, he thinks, that’s too weird to make up.
I observe that having an actress of Nigerian and English heritage as Marianne (the excellent Natalie Simpson) gives a sinister undertone to the man’s forgetfulness, perhaps suggesting racial bias as its cause. Was that the intention? “She just auditioned very well,” Hampton says briskly. “It makes it even stranger that he’s forgotten about her somehow. But she does have a speech about being shouted at in the street by children. So . . . it just worked.”
The male actor (James Corrigan) has to be very generous, taking second place to Marianne and mostly being reactive. “Yes, it’s really what Alan Rickman used to call ‘holding up the ballerina’. It’s one of the things I like about it. It’s a play about a woman. I’ve done a few of those,” he adds.


While Hampton’s 1995 film Carrington was a sensitive portrayal of troubled Bloomsbury Group painter Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson), Glenn Close embodied feminine malevolence in 1988’s Dangerous Liaisons. The film was based on Hampton’s 1985 play, which he adapted from 18th-century French writer Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and it earned him his first Oscar. (The second, for Best Adapted Screenplay and shared with Florian Zeller, came for The Father in 2021.)
More recently there has been the monologue A German Life, where Goebbels’ secretary reminisces later in life, a triumph for Maggie Smith in 2019 at the Bridge Theatre. Visit from an Unknown Woman thus becomes the third in a loose Austro-German trilogy, along with his stage adaptation of a Ödön von Horváth novel, Youth Without God, concerning the Hitler Youth. All three speak to our current political situation, Hampton believes.
“There was a period [in the 1930s] when people kind of knew what was coming but said, ‘Oh no, it’s not going to happen.’ And then it did. I’m very interested in those avoidance mechanisms that people were going through at that particular moment in history. Because I think they’re doing the same thing now.”
A black-and-white photograph of a bespectacled man wearing a tie under a mackintosh
Christopher Hampton, pictured in 1966 © Reg Burkett/Getty Images
Visit appears almost 60 years after his precocious debut, When Did You Last See My Mother?, first staged in Oxford in February 1966 when he was still an undergraduate. He was recommended to the redoubtable theatrical agent Margaret Ramsay, who imperiously summoned Hampton to London for a meeting. “I said, ‘I’ve got a lecture on Baudelaire’ — to which she said, ‘Fuck Baudelaire!’”
By that June, his debut had transferred from London’s Royal Court theatre to the West End — Hampton remains the youngest playwright to have a West End hit. “I have had flops,” he goes on, still sounding bemused about the savage critical reception of Total Eclipse, the play about 19th-century French poets and lovers Rimbaud and Verlaine, which was “disastrously received” when it first came out.
Yet the genre of biographical drama, especially drawing on works from the highest intellectual ranks, turned out to be his forte. Thanks to his ability to scamper across European culture with ease, Hampton became the go-to for plays and screenplays that transformed highbrow source material into box-office bustle, with no loss of prestige along the way. Total Eclipse survived to become one of his most performed pieces, eventually being made into a film starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis in 1995.
A film still of young man holding his head in his bloodstained hands
Leonardo DiCaprio as the poet Rimbaud in ‘Total Eclipse’ (1995), directed by Agnieska Holland with a screenplay by Hampton © Alamy
The key is not to embroider or embellish the source material. “In my experience, what really happened is more interesting than what people invent. After all,” he says with a smile, “most people’s lives contain half a dozen completely unbelievable incidents. I think what people are interested in is what’s true.” In a post-truth world, it amounts to an article of faith.



A Silence - Dune director throws shade at the Deadpool & Wolverine popcorn bucket

A Silence - Emmanuelle Devos and Daniel Auteuil

Un silence


The end is near … Beer consumption in the Czech Republic plummets to a record low




For all the conveniences of streaming, there’s still something to be said about venturing out to see a film at a movie theater. Sure, there isn’t an endless amount of choice, and you can’t pause when something else requires your attention but seeing a compelling film on the silver screen is its own treat.

On 29 and 30 June, the Palace cinemas are  making it more affordable to enjoy that experience. Antonio Zeccola's Palace offers discounted $8 tickets. 


Dune director throws shade at the Deadpool & Wolverine popcorn bucket

 There’s a war brewing in Hollywood and we’re not talking about how AI will inevitably kill us all by plagiarizing The Joker’s chaos plans from The Dark Knight. We’re talking about the popcorn bucket war.

The latest shot came from Dune director Denis Villeneuve in a red carpet interview in which he called the Wolverine & Deadpool popcorn bucket “horrific” and called the Dune buckets “unmatchable.”

Villeneuve did an impromptu interview with eTalkCTV where a reporter asked him about the feud that’s been brewing between him and Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds over their respective popcorn receptacles. The reporter showed Villeneuve a picture of the Deadpool & Wolverine bucket featuring the yellow Wolverine’s head and his gaping maw full of some of Orville Redenbacher’s finest. Villeneuve said he doesn’t have anything against the bucket but he thinks they are just riding the coattails he unfurled when the Dune sandworm popcorn bucket blew up the Internet.


“I’m not saying I don’t like the bucket,” Villeneuve said. “I’m just saying it was difficult to beat the Dune bucket. It was like one of a kind.”

He’s got a point. Popcorn buckets weren’t even a movie going craze until the release of the Dune 2 sandworm bucket, a popcorn tub that looks like a sex toy punishment designed by Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies. It sparked a whole new marketing trend for the struggling movie theater industry that’s been trying to fight the convenient onslaught of streaming media. Theaters and studios produced special buckets for other movies like Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’s ghost trap and ECTO-1 buckets, Wonka’s Willy Wonka hat bucket and Inside Out 2’s core memory receptacle bucket.

Starring the Computer: a catalog of computers used in movies

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.


       New World Literature Today

       The July/August issue of World Literature Today is now out, with a focus on International Horror in Translation. 
       And, of course, there's the always interesting book review section.


Starring the Computer: a catalog of computers used in movies and TV shows. For instance: “The first episode of Andor has a heavily modified Tandy TRS-80 Model 


French potter Jacques Monneraud makes ceramic pots that look like teapots, vases, and pitchers made from cardboard and scotch tape. He offers these pots for sale, but they’re unsurprisingly sold out right now. More about Monneraud & his work on his website and Instagram. (via @presentandcorrect)


Corey Costelloe - Spiritual Chappell 20 - Since leaving Hunter St Hospitality (Rockpool Bar & Grill), the group’s former culinary director has been keeping himself busy


Precision ultrasound could treat deep parts of brain without surgery New Scientist


Jazz Remains the Sound of Modernism The Millions




 Kinky Friedman, Proudly Eccentric Texas Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 79.

Exit quotes


Fake …


2 1ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:  I Was Content With Monogamy. I Shouldn’t Have Been

Using LiDAR data from the US Geological Survey and a site called ReliefViz, a Reddit user created this lovely blue and greyscale shaded relief map of Manhattan (and the surrounding area). It’s worth clicking through to explore the full-size image.


 Hockley Clarke on his relationship with a blackbird who lived in his garden. “There was perfect trust between us, a source of joy to me, and it must have been a comfort to him. Perhaps birds understand more than we think.”


Every Kind of Bridge Explained in 15 Minutes


Walmart is switching to electronic price tagsthat “allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds”. No one wants this!! No one wants surge pricing on ice cream and price increases on items already in your cart.

For 22 years reflecting on 1980: You Can’t Go Home Again

You can learn a line
from a win
and a book
from a defeat.
~ Paul Brown who shared with deep bloggers the old saying "no good deed goes unpunished."


Media dragon started in the evening on 30 June 2002 at the end of financial year Down Under …  (Czech Out Media Dragon Museum)

In the world of blogging, 22 years is a momentous milestone … and in the Internet years MEdia Dragon is thousand years old relic …  Back in June 2011 Steve Jobs observed that Media Dragon was even back then craziest and ancient


Our Complicated Relationship With Nostalgia

Even if nostalgia is a less “dangerous emotion” today than it seems to have been to the Swiss soldiers, it well deserves to be taken seriously and sympathetically. - The Guardian

Lou Martinez’s favourite President Joe Bidden awarded posthumously Steve in 2022 The Presidential Medal of Freedom which is the highest US honor that can be given to a civilian


When you consider that statistics show 80% of new blogs fail within 18 months following their launch, it really puts into perspective how massive over two decade of blogging is.


The best preparation for blogging is a lifetime of paying attention and sticking your neck out - have your skin in the game of level playing media fields.  Crossing the deadly Iron Curtain also helps to ignore even no one was reading anything I wrote …


Over those twenty two years, I’ve written well over 15,000 posts, some brief, some long, some silly, some serious and linked to some  impressive bloggers, writers, heroes

From Cold War River to Sultry Antipodean Sea 


“”You learn something every day" is the motto of this blog. As courageous Kate Braverman observed: 

"Writing is like crime. The page is about what you can get away with. We break and enter, transgress, autopsy the living and dead, rob, exchange identities, lie, confess, steal. The arts of writing and successful crime are the same. Opportunity. Robbery. Seizure. Con. Misdirection. Theft. Fiction is a form of fraud, the most elegant, exquisite and complicated forms of creative fraud."


Why put up with the grief that writing a blog guarantees I’ll get? Funding the Future

Political and philosophical blogs especially have always been an incredible source of inspiration for me.

Note for example that philosophy blog Daily Nous Turned 10 in 2024 AD!


Blogging appealed to me because it was positioned in this unique digital space somewhere between storytelling, scrap-booking, learning, helping me to listen more, and finding brothers and sisters who make the world tick ...

It is hard not to be appreciative of the little engine community of Media Dragons that could when you consider that there are over 1.5 billion blogs worldwide.  About 30-32% of those bloggers are in the US. Australian 🇦🇺 bloggers like me comprise of 1% of that total.  I am also in the 7.1% group of bloggers aged over 50Over 7 million blog posts are published every single day! 77% of internet users read blogs. 


When I think of who I was back in 2002, how much I’ve changed, how much my life has changed, how much the world has changed, it’s a little surreal. When I wrote my first blog post, Kindles and iPhones didn’t exist. And computer monitors were still fat and chunky and the operating systems were in towers. I still used a camera with film of my two daughters that had to be developed. I’m pretty sure accessing the internet was still via dial-up. Gracious! That was a long time ago. I was based at Brisvegas then, lived such a different life - as philosopher keep telling us past is such a foreign country 

 I certainly didn’t anticipate the adventure my journey would be. . . Almost three (3) Million views from all corners of the world even the King of Bohemia did not reach as far as this dragon-folklore fuelled blog  😇


How lucky to be alive at the same time as Vaclav Havel and characters like Steve Jobs who  said the following in a 1994 interview with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing. It's to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that's very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better, cause it's kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.


Louise Dodson Nov 5, 1996 NSW joins Canberra on the Internet

The NSW Parliament has now joined the Federal Parliament with a range of parliamentary information available on the Internet. However, the NSW Parliament World Wide Web site will provide the most comprehensive information. 
It includes explanations about the operations, procedures and legislative processes in NSW, historical information, biographical information about all the ministers and members, daily Hansards, business papers, bills before the House and daily "whats on" information for both the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council. 
"The development of this site gives the people of NSW unprecedented access to information about the workings of democracy in this State," the president of the Legislative Council, Mr Max Willis, said. 
The speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Mr John Murray, promised it would be updated daily.

"This will be a valuable education and business resource," he said. The NSW Public Accounts Committee's Mr Jozef Imrich said the Web technology gives users the opportunity to bring government within easy reach of people irrespective of geographic barriers. 
In the United States, the Government has developed an Interactive Citizen's Handbook, as an electronic guide through government agencies and departments to bring a new "town hall-style democracy" to the people. 
The versatile Internet is also being used for telemedicine services.Australian medical technology company, Micromedical Industries, is using advanced Internet technologies for accessing doctors via a modem. 
For instance, the Internet can be used for a heart check-up by uploading one's ECG to a central server. Mr Peter Ludemann, the chairman of Micromedical Industries, said: "We have paved the way for a system which is accessible to remote communities, the home bound or even the world's fitness enthusiasts who want access to online medical expertise."

Almost three-million clicks and counting for MEdia Dragon 🐉 

I am old enough to remember theofficial birthday of the internet 1st January 1983. The period takes me back to manual media clippings area at the NSW Parliamentary Library. Although the Internet  wasn't until 10 years later, in 1993 when it became available to the public. My first parliamentary email address was for work shortly after that date. I remember using the terrible Alta Vista search engine because Google did not come along until 1998 when we invaded Czech 🇨🇿 and Slovak Republics.



A global, 16-year study1 of 2.4 million people has found that Internet use might boost measures of well-being, such as life satisfaction and sense of purpose — challenging the commonly held idea that Internet use has negative effects on people’s welfare.
Is the internet bad for you?

“A good, blogger, intel analyst, writer always works at the impossible.”


If you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito

Accents Can Be Contagious

That foreign accent students sometimes come home with after studying abroad isn't (or isn't only) an affectation. - The Atlantic (MSN)

Fifteen Year Blogiversary for Whispering Gums, with a Giveaway


Brat from Bratislava


Quoting the social theorist Bruno Latour, Becker encourages us to think of time as less like an “irreversible arrow” and more like a “plate of spaghetti.” The past is perpetually “recombined, reinterpreted, and reshuffled,” Latour ventures; it loops around and doubles back on the present. All this may sound like postmodern esotericism, but the idea of the past overlapping and entwining with the present is not some recent import from French theory. The rabbinic scholar Lynn Kaye has found a similar temporal flexibility in the Talmud (for example, in the Passover rituals with which Jews attempt to merge the present with the long-ago events of Exodus). More plainly, we can see in the built environment of any city the commingling of past and present. 

You Can’t Go Home Again The uses of nostalgia



Whatever the history, whatever the nuances, whatever the charged sentiments associated with political realities, the thirst for freedom is very simple: It means believing that if regimes built 10ft wall you will create a 12ft ladder




When Online Content Disappears

“38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view. A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:

  • A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible,as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
  • For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023…” [beSpacific – free – solo owned, researched, edited, published online since – 2002]


Without Main Street media most blogs would be up the creek or cold river