Nice Guys Finish First: The Philanthropist's Rocky Trek from Page to Stage

He would eventually win an Academy Award, two Tony Awards and more than a dozen additional prizes for his contributions to film, television and theater over the course of a 40-year career and counting, but standing in 1965 in front of a cast list posted without his name on it outside Oxford University’s theater, a young Hampton was officially shut out of participating in the school play.

So the fact that his name is gracing Broadway programs for the twelfth time and the second time in a just over a year, if you count 2008’s Tony-nominated remounting of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Roundabout’ Theatre Company's revival of his early comedy, The Philanthropist, about starched academics at Oxford, is a little ironic—and, 40 years after the fact, still a little validating.

Oxford Cloth
“I tried very hard to take part in university theater,” Hampton told Broadway.com in a wide-ranging interview about his career, “but I did not manage to make myself a part of it.” Don’t feel too bad; the future playwright, who studied French and German at Oxford, did, on occasion, land bit parts in smaller productions. “On the other hand, my first play was accepted by the Royal Court Theater while I was still a student, so it’s odd how things play out, isn’t it?”

The odd playing of events has been a running theme throughout Hampton’s life. Born in Faial, Azores, Portugal, to British parents, he spent his early childhood in exotic locales like Hong Kong, Zanzibar and Egypt for his father’s work as a telecommunications engineer. The outbreak of the violent Suez Crisis of 1956 forced the then 10-year-old Hampton and his family to flee Egypt under cover of darkness after his father’s office was bombed, resulting in his relocation to boarding school at Lancing College in England.

An excellent student with a writer’s predilection for observing people and their interactions a skill that would ultimately be his ticket into the theater, Hampton took the natural next step by enrolling at Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world and peculiarly insulated universe of its own.

“It was a sort of haven, or pool of tranquility,” Hampton recalls, “but within that was this heaving anthill of ambition—clever people trying to climb on top of one another. I always found that the theater, which is supposed to be bitchy, was nothing compared to the envy and ambition that is the air you breathe at university.”

Bigger and Better Things
Initially shut out of Oxford’s theatrical community, Hampton focused on his linguistics studies, graduating with honors in 1968. But in 1966 another interesting turn of events ended up leading the failed actor to even bigger and better theatrical opportunities.

“I had written a play [When Did You Last See My Mother?, a serio-comic piece about latent homosexuality at boarding school] when I was 18, before Oxford, and didn’t know what to do with it,” he explains. “My French teacher at university, who was on the board of the Oxford Dramatics Society, encouraged me to enter it in a competition for student plays. I was very disappointed to be told next term that it hadn’t been selected.” 

The disappointment was only temporary: “A couple of weeks later, the board came to see me and said the play that won was too expensive to stage, and as my play was extremely cheap, they’d decided to replace the winning play with mine.” Within three weeks, When Did You Last See My Mother?, with Hampton in the lead role, was playing on the Oxford stage, going on to win a rave review from the UK newspaper The Guardian. Within three months, powerful theatrical agent Margaret Ramsey convinced London’s Royal Court Theater to produce the play, making Hampton the youngest writer ever to have a play staged on the West End.

“I didn’t understand at the time how extraordinary it was, but it was quite a break,” he understates.

The Accidental Dramatist
Two years after his West End debut, Hampton graduated Oxford and was immediately hired by the Royal Court as the theater's first ever resident dramatist. “What this meant was that they invented a fancy label to get a grant from the arts council,” Hampton chuckles slyly, “because in fact I was doing so many other jobs—from running the literary department to meeting new writers to going to see new plays all over the country and writing reports on them—that toward the end of the first year I said, ‘Look, I’ve no time to write a play!’”

The Royal Court responded that if he could find someone to help run the literary department on very little pay, he could get down to writing. “So I hired David Hare.” A friend from school, Hare would eventually take over Hampton’s position at the company before launching his own very successful playwriting career.

The play Hampton finally settled down to write was a farcical comedy of manners and errors set among an insulated group of academics at—where else—Oxford. The work was inspired by the 17th-century Moliere classic La Misanthrope known in English as The Misanthrope, a satirical skewering of the French artistocracy about a man, Alceste, who cannot help but tell the truth and criticizes everyone around him.

“Moliere was one of my special subjects as a student, and I rather liked him,” Hampton explains. “I was writing a dissertation on La Misanthrope in 1968 and got the idea that in the climate of the time, which was full of revolutionary ferment everywhere in Europe except for Oxford, that in those conditions a man who had the opposite characteristics of ‘La Misanthrope’—in other words, a man who absolutely breaks his back to be as nice to everyone as he possibly could—would be as severe an irritant as someone who told the truth in the 17th century.”

Titled The Philanthropist, Hampton’s “first play as a working playwright” centered around Philip, a university professor whose inexplicable amiability offends nearly everyone around him and causes a mountain of trouble, including the potential loss of his fiancee, Celia. The action was set against the backdrop of an imagined terrorist attack on the British government, one that barely raises a stir among the self-centered Oxford brainiacs.

“What I wanted to do at the time was make the point that however extraordinarily bizarre the happenings in the outside world were, like the Vietnam War, there were people who weren’t affected by it,” Hampton notes. “Because that was my very strong sense of the hermetic sense of Oxford at the time: It was a lot of extremely clever people sitting around doing nothing but trying to get one up on each other.”

A Comedy Tonight?
The Royal Court Theatre was less than enthusiastic about their young dramatist’s maiden professional voyage. “They were baffled by it—they didn’t feel it was quite a Royal Court play,” Hampton says. “They went through, I believe, four directors who gave up on it!” The young writer tried to work with his employers. “I did try to do some rewrites, but the rewrites were never as good as the real thing. So basically what you see on the stage today is the first draft.”

Though four directors did indeed pass on the project including Tony Award winner Anthony Page, whose Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot will open four days after The Philanthropist, frequent collaborator Robert Kidd eventually took on Hampton’s comedic opus. “He’d always wanted to do it,” the playwright recalls, “and after 10 months of agony and rejection from the other directors, the Royal Court said, ‘All right, you can do it.’” Casting was the next obstacle. Future Academy Award nominee Alan Bates was first discussed as leading man Philip, as was future Emmy Award winner David Warner, but the role ultimately went to Alec McCowen, with Jane Asher as Celia.

“The rehearsals were pretty miserable,” Hampton recalls. “They often are when you’re doing a comedy. At a certain point, you can’t imagine that anyone is ever going to laugh at the play.” After a few weeks, the still-dubious Royal Court honchos called a meeting with the show’s team. After an hour of discussion about all the problems with The Philanthropist—from scenes that seemed deathly unfunny to technical issues—Hampton’s mentor, William Gaskell, heaved a sigh and declared, “I’m sorry, but it’s the play.” Hampton and the actors left feeling utterly discouraged, black clouds hanging over their light comedy. But with previews just days away, the show had to, as they say, go on.

Then came the Hollywood ending.

“During the first preview, there was a sudden eruption of laughter right from the beginning,” Hampton remembers. “And it just continued. By the end, the actors were hugely relieved, and we all knew we had a success.” The Philanthropist opened to rave reviews in 1970, becoming the Royal Court’s most successful comedy ever. And, despite being satirized, the Oxford contingent took the play in stride. “It’s quite hard to make anyone take offense at Oxford!” Hampton says with a laugh. “That’s part of the façade, the smooth surface of the place. I think they were quite amused by it.”

Give His Regards to Broadway
The Philanthropist crossed the pond to Broadway in 1971, opening at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on March 11 and playing 64 performances. The play, starring Alec McCowen, Jane Asher, Paul Corum, Carolyn Lagerfelt, Victor Spinetti, Penelope Wilton and Ed Zimmerman garnered three Tony Award nominations, for Best Play, Best Actor McCowen and Best Featured Actor Zimmermann.

In 1975, a television adaptation on British TV starred Ronald Pickup as Philip and future Academy Award winner Helen Mirren as Celia. Manhattan Theatre Club revived the play off-Broadway in 1983 with David McCallum as Philip, Glenne Headly as Celia and a supporting cast that included Brent Spiner and Cherry Jones.

Some 40 years after it was penned by its now prolific playwright and translator, The Philanthropist was revived to great acclaim at London's Donmar Warehouse four years ago with Simon Russell Beale as Philip and Anna Madeley as Celia. The production’s director, David Grindley has spent the past two seasons on Broadway Journey’s End, Pygmalion, The American Plan, and Roundabout tapped him collaborate with Tony Award winner Matthew Broderick as Philip, paired with Madeley in her Broadway debut. Completing the cast are Steven Weber, Jonathan Cake, Tate Ellington, Jennifer Mudge and Samantha Soule.

As opening night approaches at the American Airlines Theatre, Hampton feels relaxed and confident about The Philanthropist’s second Broadway incarnation. “It’s always great when plays are revived, because it enables you to come into the process with a certain amount of confidence,” he says. “It is a play I’ve always enjoyed very much, and this particular group of actors has had a great time putting it on. We’ve had a lot of laughs.”

As for lessons learned from his first big success, Hampton replies, “Never write another comedy! I’m quite serious. I’ve never written another formal comedy.”