Playwright Christopher Hampton on his new work Visit from an Unknown Woman which deals with sexual obsession at a time of political turmoil.
Suzi Feay, Financial Times

 

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.

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Visit from an Unknown Woman 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 Peggy 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.

 

Visit the Financial Times online to read the full interview here.

 

Visit From an Unknown Woman plays the Main Stage until 27 July.

 

BOOK VISIT FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN HERE