He can't help himself and he plunges into the forest. until the moment it dawns on him: night has fallen and he is completely lost. Pierre finds himself at a turning point, tormented by the conflicting demands of family, career and sexual desire. His struggle to resolve this crisis, without fracturing his marriage or compromising his comfortable way of life, is explored in original and unsettling ways. Florian Zeller's raw and mysterious play, translated by Christopher Hampton, premieres at Hampstead Theatre, London, in February 2022. I'm telling you a story, if that's all right by you. Apparently you've no objection to telling stories yourself. Am I right?

Nicolas is going through a difficult phase after his parents' divorce. He's listless, skipping classes, lying. He believes moving in with his father and his new family may help. A different school, a fresh start. When he senses he isn't wanted there, he decides to go back to his mother's. But what happens when the options dry up? I'm telling you. I don't understand what's happening to me. Florian Zeller's The Son completes a trilogy with The Mother and The Father, all of which are translated by Christopher Hampton. The Son premiered at the Kiln Theatre, London, in February 2019, and transferred to the Duke of York's Theatre in August.

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.

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.

Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya in a new version by Christopher Hampton. This version will be first staged at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, on 25 October 2012 and run until 16 February 2013. 'It's often said that the best of the Chekhov plays is the one you've seen most recently. Uncle Vanya doesn't have a suicide, like The Seagull, or an adulterous couple and a duel more or less indistinguishable from murder, like Three Sisters; nor does it seem to announce the end of an era, like The Cherry Orchard: all it has is a series of ludicrously bungled attempts at murder and suicide and adultery. Perhaps these failures are what makes it feel the saddest and most truthful of these great tragi-comedies, in which, possibly unique to all drama, not a single word seems redundant or out of place.' - From the author's introduction.

Set in the socially and economically oppressed Vienna of the early thirties, this play is the story of a young girl's struggle to survive in the city, a victim of forces she does not comprehend. As the play opens, she is trying to sell her body to an anatomical institute.

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.

I know now, Kostya, I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure. The Seagull is one of the great plays about writing. It superbly captures the struggle for new forms, the frustrations and fulfilments of putting words on a page. Chekhov, in his first major play, staged a vital argument about the theatre which still resonates today. Christopher Hampton's new version of this classic, directed by Ian Rickson in his last production as Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre, London, premiered in January 2007.

The Mother Anne loved the time in her life when she prepared breakfast each morning for her two young children. Years later, spending hours alone, Anne convinces herself that her husband is having an affair. If only her son were to break-up with his girlfriend. He would return home and come down for breakfast. She would put on her new red dress and they would go out. The Mother, in this English translation by Christopher Hampton, was commissioned by the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath, and premiered in May 2015. Florian Zeller's The Mother was awarded the Moliere Award for Best Play 2011. The Father 'A wonderfully peculiar, quietly stunning depiction of dementia... A controlled, unforgettable portrait of losing your memory.' Times 'A vivid, lucent translation by Christopher Hampton.' Observer 'One of the most acute, absorbing and distressing portraits of dementia I've ever seen.' Daily Telegraph 'A play that constantly confounds expectations and works almost like a thriller, with a sinister Pinteresque edge.' Guardian The Father, in this English translation by Christopher Hampton, was commissioned by the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath and premiered in October 2014. The production transferred to the Tricycle Theatre, London, in May 2015. Florian Zeller's The Father was awarded the Moliere Award for Best Play 2014.

Characters: 9 male, 4 female

Scenery: Interior

This translation of Moliere's classic depiction of hypocrisy in action was done for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

"The assumption behind this ferociously brilliant production is that Tartuffe is much too serious and alarming a work to be insulated behind any English equivalent of French classical style. The greatest compliment I can bestow on Hampton's translation is that...you hardly notice it. Plain, perfectly phrased blank verse does the job."-London Times

What happens when two sets of parents meet up to deal with the unruly behaviour of their children? A calm and rational debate between grown-ups about the need to teach ids how to behave properly? Or a hysterical night of name-calling, tantrums and tears before bedtime? Boys will be boys, but the adults are usually worse - much worse. Christopher Hampton's translation of Yasmina Reza's sharp-edged new play The God of Carnage premiered at the Gielgud Theatre, London, in March 2008. Christopher Hampton has translated five plays by Yasmina Reza: 'Art', The Unexpected Man, Conversations after a Burial, Life x 3 and The God of Carnage.

The Father, in this English translation by Christopher Hampton, was commissioned by the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath and premiered in October 2014. The production transferred to the Tricycle Theatre, London and subsequently to Wyndham's Theatre in the West End. Florian Zeller's The Father was awarded the Moliere Award for Best Play and the Olivier and Tony Awards for Best Actor.

'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 premiere 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 new play 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, Sabina Spielrein. The success of the experiment and the blossoming of his relationship with Sabina 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 premièred at the Royal National Theatre in December 2002.

Winner of the Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy

Christopher Hampton's wry, poignant drama depicts the consequences of old literary Europe's attempt to integrate into fast-paced commercial Hollywood in the early years of World War II. With Austro-Hungarian playwright Ödön Von Horváth resurrected as our guide, Tales from Hollywood leads us through a bizarre landscape where Schoenberg and the Marx Brothers play tennis, Brecht tries to write film treatments the studios will clamor over, and Heinrich Mann endeavors to maintain a dignified despair, overshadowed by his younger brother Thomas, who thrives on his celebrity status. As the war ends and McCarthyism sets in, the younger èmigrès assimilate but the older ones, unable to bear what they term the "tragic innocence" and relentless "cuteness" of America, go into a slow decline. Meanwhile, Horváth's conversations and observations raise questions of personal accountability for the unchecked rise of Nazism in Europe in the thirties and the futility of being homesick for countries that have forced one into exile.

In its contrast of the two continents, Tales from Hollywood paints a wistful, humorous portrait of a time when Europe and North America were in the throes of artistic, ideological, and political changes that would forever alter their own identities as well as their relations to each other.

This major anthology spans 500 years of radical protest from the Peasants' Revolt to the First World War. This book provides an alternative political and social history of England. This is history as creative defiance, as communal action, involving the intellectual and imaginative witnesses of those among the privileged - poets, writers, and thinkers - who have had the strength and courage to make themselves passionate spokesmen for the dispossessed. Here are passages from More's "Utopia", Hobbes' "Leviathan", Bunyans' "Pilgrim's Progress", Mary Wolstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Women". Here, too, are extracts from Wyclif, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Winstanley, Marvell, Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, Cobbett, Byron, Shelley, Dickens and Marx - plus a wealth of hitherto inaccessible documents. 'There is something for everybody in Mr Hampton's 600 pages ...A most useful, thought-provoking collection.' - Christopher Hill, "The Guardian".

Two couples. Friendship, suspicion, deceit. And the truth. Florian Zeller's The Truth, in the English translation by Christopher Hampton, premiered at The Chocolate Factory, London, in association with Theatre Royal Bath. It follows the phenomenal success of The Father (Theatre Royal Bath, Tricycle, London and West End) and The Mother (Theatre Royal Bath, Tricycle, London), both by Florian Zeller and translated by Christopher Hampton.

Simon Weinberg is dead. And, on a November morning, he is buried in accordance with his wishes on the Loiret family estate. Gathered together at his funeral are six people—brothers and sisters, lovers, husbands and wives. Mourning allows them special privilege and, for a few hours, they are isolated in another world under a lingering sun, in the shadow of the deceased. Conversations After a Burial explores that ineffable moment of mourning, wherein the newly deceased is still almost palpable, the moment in which one can still maintain the memory of a breath, the intense moment between the absence and the return to every day existence, between loss and life.

Here is the greatest account ever written of the destructiveness of missionary zeal. Gregers Werle enters the house of photographer Ekdal preaching 'the demands of idealism'(a nicely ambiguous phrase in Hampton's translation) and systematically destroys a family's happiness.

What happens when two sets of parent's meet up to deal with the unruly behaviour of their children? A calm and rational debate between grown-ups about the need to teach kids how to behave properly? Or a hysterical night of name-calling, tantrums and tears before bedtime? Boys will be boys, but the adults are usually worse - much worse. God of Carnage won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy and the Tony award for Best Play.

Henrik Ibsen

Translated by Christopher Hampton

Full Length, Drama

Characters: 3 male, 2 female

Interior Set

This riveting family drama is a classic of the modern theatre. Oswald Alving returns for the dedication of the orphanage to his father's memory and has a flirtation with the family maid who, it turns out, is his father's illegitimate daughter. As the long-supressed truths collide, the orphanage is destroyed by fire, the maid deserts the family in disgust when she learns her true parentage, and Mrs. Alving is left alone to care for her hopelessly insane son who has fallen prey to the social disease that killed his father. The role of Mrs. Alving, considered one of the greatest in the modern repertoire, has been played by Liv Ullman, Geraldine Page, Eva Le Galliene, Mrs. Fiske, Alla Nazimova and Eleonora Duse.

Christopher Hampton

Drama

Characters: 10 male, 5 female, plus extras

Various Sets

Revised version. Total Eclipse is an intelligent look at the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine and shows considerable insight into the bourgeois and artistic societies of the period as well as a moving understanding of homosexuality.

"The first six scenes develop the contrast between the two men...and their mutual need for each other as they move through and away from the literary life of the time and from Verlaine's wife and her family. A remarkable cafe dialogue with the two poets drunk and drugged subtly suggests the private, timeless world they built together and ends on a note of violence to show how fragile it was...A compelling evening in the theatre." - New Statesman

Drama

Characters: 3male, 2female

Interior Set

Jimmy and Ian share a flat. Jimmy is "straight"; and Ian is "not." Neither are very "gay." One night Jimmy brings a girl home. He tries to get Ian and his friend to go out so he can have some privacy but Ian refuses. In fact, he gets very angry, leading to a fight. Jimmy's mother comes to visit Ian, and there ensues a mutual sexual attraction, which is consummated. The mother tries to get Ian to go to bed with her again; but Ian tells her he only did it because she reminded him of Jimmy. Ian hints Jimmy has a homosexual side which Jimmy is not aware of. This upsets the mother so much she has a fight with Jimmy which upsets her so much more she has a fatal automobile accident. In the end, Jimmy and Ian come to a deeper knowledge of themselves.

In Florian Zeller's The Lie, a companion piece to his earlier play The Truth, Michel and Laurence are coming for dinner. But Alice has spotted Michel kissing another woman that very afternoon, leaving her with a dilemma. Her husband Paul believes it is better to behave as if nothing has happened; Alice is far from sure. An argument ensues and as their own relationship is held up to scrutiny, the question as to who is being protected and why grows ever more difficult to answer. Translated by Christopher Hampton, The Lie received its English language world premiere at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, in September 2017.