Smash hit

“The thing about Liaisons is that by identifying certain things that were going on at the time and pushing them to their logical extreme in a kind of mathematical way, Laclos just laid everything bare. It has been said it is the best sex education a boy could have. It is very wise about what buttons people push and how one’s vanity is all tied up with a question of sex.”

The first sex education lesson Hampton gave us came from a play he wrote even before he went up to Oxford, When Did You Last See My Mother? Although it was highly praised when the Royal Court produced it in 1966, he has since excluded it from editions of his collected works. This, he says, is because he no longer rates it, rather than out of embarrassment for its theme of adolescent homosexuality, though he does not deny that it was partly autobiographical.

“At my school I would say that it was more of a sort of romantic thing than an actual sexual thing, but people did have crushes on other boys. It was sort of staring at people in chapel. Interestingly enough, the people at school who did become gay were not the people who were involved in that kind of thing. What went on most of the time was people fell for boys who looked like girls and were a bit younger.”

Did he think he was gay?

“No, because in the holidays I was hanging around youth clubs and trying to go to dances. I remember the summer in Zanzibar, which is where my father was stationed in the early 1960s, just trying as hard as I could to get a girlfriend and actually having two or three girlfriends, but not being able to parlay that into anything. I suppose if I thought about it at all, I might have thought I was bisexual for a moment, but it passed as soon as I got to Oxford.”

After a heterosexual love affair there, almost immediately on coming down he fell in love with his landlady in Earls Court, a social worker, now a design shop owner, exotically named Laura de Holesch. They married in 1971 and have two grown-up daughters.

Whatever his debut’s faults, being championed by Peggy Ramsay and the Royal Court was a tremendous coup for someone scarcely out of his teens. His only regret was that his father, Bernard, an engineer for Cable and Wireless, had died from a stroke the year before at the age of 59 (just two years older than Christopher is now) and never saw it.

“I think he would have been very shocked by the play. He used to get very grumpy about bad language in movies.”

But his mother saw it. What did she think?

“She was extremely calm, quite surprised. She just said ‘Very good, dear’, in a neutral sort of way. Often at first nights she would be anxious to discuss some matter that had nothing to do with the play at all: whether we were coming to lunch next Sunday or whatever. I think White Chameleon was the only time I ever saw her defences breached.”

Staged at the Cottesloe a quarter of a century later, White Chameleon was more directly autobiographical, this time about his childhood in Egypt, where his father’s work had taken him in the 1950s. In it, Bernard comes across as a relaxed and liberal parent, in the run-up to Suez sympathising more with the Egyptians than the British (possibly because his mother was Irish). Christopher’s late mother, Dorothy, in contrast, seems a remote and unhappy figure.

“I suppose she was in certain ways remote in an English kind of way. She wasn’t unkind or anything, but there was some sort of unhappiness that I never got to the bottom of or understood. And when she saw the play, which I was very nervous about, she was terribly moved by it. Tears started pouring down her face the minute it started pretty well. At a certain point after I said ‘Look, a lot of people have asked me this, the scene where I find you weeping in the back room: what were you crying about? And she said ‘I really can’t remember’.”