Makers of Real Shapes: Christopher Hampton and his Story-tellers

Makers of Real Shapes: Christopher Hampton and his Story-tellers SEBASTIAN BLACK Christopher Hampton has always insisted that his plays have little in common. In an interview after Savages he was asked whether he saw "any kind of development in [his] ... work - in retrospect," to which he firmly replied: "No. People have often asked, but I see no connection between my plays whatsoever, except for the fact that I wrote them. I try to approach each subject in a way appropriate to it."1 Even more forcefully, he told Oleg Kerensky: '''I have a violent urge not to repeat myself."'2 Critical opinion has largely been content to accept the author's own description of his work, while at the same time drawing a rough distinction between his elegant comedies of manners, When Did You Last See My Mother?, The Philanthropist, and Treats, and the two plays which tackle more ambitious subjects in broader settings, Total Eclipse and Savages. However, an examination of Hampton's two most successful plays, The Philanthropist and Savages, reveals that his laudable desire not to be categorized is misleading, and that it fails to do justice to his insights about an almost obsessive concern in so much modem writing: the responsibilities of writers, and the traps and delusions to which they are prone. He has admitted that he was drawn to write Total Eclipse as an investigation of what it means to be a writer: '''what are his hopes and responsibilities?' "3 One can go further and say that this is the large subject of all Hampton's plays inside which his other, at first sight different, topics are set. Finally, I shall argue that as one watches him examine his own craft, the skill with which he avoids the dangers he believes to be inherent in it becomes evident. Hampton's plays are full of writers of one sort or another: Rimbaud and Verlaine in Total Eclipse, Braham Head and John in The Philanthropist , West and the aspiring Carlos in Savages, Dave in Treats, and 208 SEBASTIAN BLACK Thomas Able with his likely literary heir Colin in the recent television play Able's Will. However, Hampton do"s not comment on the art he practises solely through his portrayal of its practitioners. Such a strategy would obtrusively stress the self-referential points that his plays are making at the expense of their more immediate subject-matter. The consequence is that his writers are not so different from their fellows. While some of them may claim to follow a vocation, in the end they all trade in an ability that is far more widespread: mastery of the gift of telling tales - yes - oh dear, yes - Hampton's characters do tell stories. If Hampton has one all-embracing subject, he also employs one dominant stylistic device: the dramatic monologue, which largely tells a tale. It is there fully formed in his first play, When Did You Last See My Mother?, where Ian is soon presented as a gifted raconteur: "Entertain Mum.... Give her one of your stories.'" If the device is less evident in the latest two plays, Dave, in Treats, can still recollect with triumphant brutality stories he told in the past, while Able explains why he gave up writing through the story of his relationship with his dead wife. In both The Philanthropist and Savages almost all the characters are accomplished story-tellers. Early in The Philanthropist Philip proudly announces, "My only advice to writers is 'make the real shapes'.'" Valid though the injunction may be, it is finally frivolous, for all Philip has done is make a clever anagram out of the two words "'Shakespeare'" and '"Hamlet''' (p. 12). As they tell their stories, the others are shown to be as careless of "the real shapes" as Philip is indifferent to them. Celia and Don tell or strive to tell tales that are simply aesthetically pleasing, whereas Braham Head is a story-teller whose main aim is to shock and to dominate his auditors, a policy which he admits to repeating in his novels, although there he has the added inducement of cash. Araminta lacks these characters' narrative flair, but she hints that...