What's been said about Christopher Hampton and Les Liaisons Dangereuses
About Christopher Hampton:
"[Christopher Hampton} is uncategorisable. To his credit, there is no school of Hampton, no loose confederation that you lump him together with. He has always been an absolute original. And his contribution in that sense is …outstanding plays that are architecturally very, very sophisticated and have the denseness of poetry." -- Director Richard Eyre
"All his comedy, and all his humour is about haplessness. Even at 13, 14, it was things going wrong that made him roar with laughter, and that was what made other people roar with laughter. He is a brilliant anecdotist. He almost collects humiliation and mishaps, and out of that comedy he has often made his work." -- Playwright David Hare
“He delivered the script and it captivated me immediately... It was so simple and cruel, and so shocking." -- Liaisons original director Howard Davies
About the Play:
“Tantalizingly wicked -- watching Les Liaisons Dangereuses makes the color rise to your cheeks” -- Hal Hinson, Washington Post
“In a virtuoso act of surgery [Hampton] has carved out the skeleton of the story and produced a text of a hundred pages as hideously diverting as the original, and with the same sting of surprising emotion at the end.” -- Claire Tomalin, writer and BBC correspondent
“Hampton has transformed Laclos’s epistolary novel of 1782 into a scintillating drama that stands artistically independent of its literary forbear. … It retains the blend of icy elegance, sophistication, wit and unleashed passion in quantities sufficient to recreate the frisson that must have thrilled a generation when the novel was first published” -- Plays & Players magazine
“This is a compelling and, one must add, thoroughly nasty evening. The astringent Mr. Hampton merges a misanthropic modern sensibility with Laclos’s equally icy, if poker-faced, perspective on the decadent ancien régime. Every time one tries to relax and enjoy
Liaisons as a spicy, distanced period piece about rich villains in fancy costumes victimizing innocent fools, Mr. Hampton and company shift the perspective just enough to sow doubts as to which side we are really on. Two centuries after Laclos first dramatized these heartless liaisons, it’s still a shock to realize how easily the deck of men and women can be stacked so that everyone is dealt a cruel hand.” – Frank Rich,
The New York Times