IN A LONG and successful career, it has been a difficult year: a leading man dead, a new play tepidly received, a film booed at the Venice Film Festival. These are poor rewards for a writer as expert and assiduous as Christopher Hampton. Perhaps we need the overdue West End revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses to remind us what a fine playwright he actually is. Liaisons is an indestructible piece — although, I confess, at the preview I went to the cast seemed intent on testing it to destruction.

In his airy office in West London some days before I go to see it, Hampton sighs, contemplating the labour of composition, the excuses there always seem to be not to get down to writing. “It’s a terrible job. I don’t know why people want to be writers. It’s a wonderful job as well, but it is a very demanding thing to be chained to.”

Everything in his line of work, I say sympathetically, is so public and so exposed: financially, critically and to a new audience every night.

“I suppose so. I never imagined early on that it would last. David Hare and I used to sit around gloomily at the Royal Court and tell each other we had ten years and we had got to make the best of them.”

To date, the Lancing College contemporaries have run up some 70 play and movie years between them. If Hare’s journalistic talent for addressing the topical has made him the bigger name, Hampton is the more accomplished writer. Even when you just read them, his plays fizz across the page. From the early Total Eclipse, about the homosexual relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud, through the critically underrated domestic comedy Treats in 1976, to Liaisons, they read like long fuses attached to barrels of emotional gunpowder. You gleefully await the inevitable explosions.

The man grumbling languidly at the other end of the sofa looks an unlikely candidate for their authorship: a phlegmatic, civilised, overweight public schoolboy with a hairstyle that must date back at least to that conversation with Hare. Although his early plays, such as The Philanthropist, guyed intellectuals, he is one himself. One Hampton stage direction notes of a character from Tales from Hollywood that “his exophthalmia is the most notable feature of his expressive face”. If a real barrel of gunpowder went off, you feel he might leave the room, but he’d pick up a dictionary and one last chocolate biscuit first.

So it will take more than 2003 to unsettle him. Nevertheless, it did its best. It began, to be accurate, last December with The Talking Cure at the National Theatre, his first original play, as opposed to an adaptation, since 1991. Inspired by the early years of psychoanalysis, it was the product of years of research by Hampton, who had discovered that Jung had used Freud’s method to cure a female patient, then fallen in love with her, with terrible consequences. Tragically, the actor playing Sigmund, the London’s Burning star James Hazeldine, was taken ill in previews and died shortly after of heart failure. With no time to recast, a younger actor in a minor role was forced to double up as Freud. The father-son relationship between the two shrinks was destroyed in an instant and reviewers remained unmoved.

Hampton was next summoned to Hollywood for a tortuous re-edit of Imagining Argentina, a film he had written and directed. Based on Lawrence Thornton’s novel about the disappearances, it is again lacerating stuff, containing a soldier’s savage rape of an Argentine journalist, played by Emma Thompson. In September it was finally ready for show at the Venice Film Festival. “The first screening was the press screening. The producer and I went in and checked the print — absolutely fine — went out to dinner and I then had a call saying ‘I’m sorry to tell you that it’s been booed’. I said ‘Oh how awful’. ‘Don’t worry. It often happens at Venice, nothing to worry about’. And then the next night was the proper opening where there was a six-minute standing ovation so I thought ‘Oh, that’s all right’.”

He had reckoned without the British press’s excitement at British failure. True to her luvvie reputation, Thompson acknowledged the applause with tears of gratitude. Her picture was then printed in the London Evening Standard next to a story that suggested she was crying because she was being booed. Hampton’s explanation for the film’s initial poor reception is that it “caught people in the raw”. He remains proud of it. Nevertheless, Imagining Argentina will for ever be the film that was booed at Venice and made Emma cry.

His run of bad luck was lifted in March by a starry production in London of his new translation of The Three Sisters. The same month, the Bristol Old Vic successfully staged its own revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Hampton recalls for me the play’s original reception in 1985. His agent, the legendary Peggy Ramsay, was well known for the tough love she showed her clients. Once, when her office burnt down, she phoned him to say that his teenage novel had gone up with it: “So it’s not all bad news, dear.” On this occasion, however, she rang him at dawn to read him a succession of ecstatic reviews. The play went to London, made stars of Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman, and transferred to Broadway. The film version, Dangerous Liaisons, won him an Oscar in 1989.

Taken from Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel, the play relishes the cruelty of the French aristocrats the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, whose sport is the mechanical seduction of innocents. It is such a potent text that during the making of the film John Malkovich, playing Valmont, actually fell in love with Michelle Pfeiffer, the actress playing his victim. As a result, he spent the next several years in therapy. Hampton says he wanted to tell him to stop complaining and just enjoy it.

I wonder how the play, which seemed at the time so much a commentary on the cynical and meretricious 1980s, will be viewed today.

“It’s interesting that it chimed with the high point of Thatcherism. That was fortuitous because I might easily have done it in the 1970s, when I first thought about it. When you see it now the resonance is slightly different. It seems now to be to do with everyone’s unhealthy interest about everyone else’s sex life. When I was relooking at it in rehearsal I thought ‘This is rather odd. It seems no longer to be about institutionalised selfishness’.