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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.
“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.”
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.
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.
To July 27, hampsteadtheatre.com
