Christopher Hampton’s name usually appears in New York theatre programs accompanied by the words “adapted” or “translated.” One of the British author’s best known works,Les Liaisons Dangereuses, revived by the Roundabout last year, was an adaptation from the 18th-century epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. This season on Broadway, his translations of The Seagull from the Russian and Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage from French have impressed critics and audiences. Finally, theatregoers will have a chance to see a Hampton original when The Philanthropist, starring Matthew Broderick, is revived at the American Airlines Theatre this spring. The play was originally written in 1969 when the Oxford University student was 23, and it debuted in London the following year. By then Hampton was already a seasoned playwright—his first play, When Did You Last See My Mother?, made it to the West End when he was 20.>

    The Philanthropist, nominated for a Best Play Tony Award when it was produced on Broadway in 1971, turns Molière’s The Misanthrope on its head. Hampton’s title character, philology professor Philip played by Matthew Broderick, is the polar opposite of Molière’s curmudgeonly title character Alceste. Life isn’t any kinder to Philip for being kind. His interpersonal relationships are fraught with misunderstandings, and his excessive politeness gets on people’s nerves. As Molière satirized French aristocrats, Hampton uses his pen to poke fun at those ensconced in the ivory tower of academia. Throughout, he drops in subtle and not-so-subtle allusions to Molière’s play and characters.

    Hampton, who won an Oscar for his Dangerous Liaisons screenplay and was nominated again for adapting Ian McEwan’s Atonement, was the epitome of the refined English author when he spoke by phone with Front & Center from across the pond.

FRONT & CENTER:How did this revival come about? The Philanthropist is a very early play of yours.

CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON: Actually, I was looking it up the other day, and I wrote it in ’69; it was performed in ’70 for the first time. So it’s 40 years old.

   I think Todd Haimes [Roundabout’s artistic director] has always had an interest in it, actually. They’ve talked about it on several occasions in the past, and then David Grindley directed a revival of the play in 2004 or 2005 at the Donmar Warehouse in London with Simon Russell Beale. I think Todd saw it and it made him sort of determined to put the play on. We’ve been waiting for the right casting.

And you thought Matthew Broderick would be ideal for Philip?

Yes, absolutely. When David called me and suggested him, I said I thought that was a really good idea. He just has this kindly air. It’s a part that can be played by all sorts of different actors, but if you cast it so accurately, that’s half the battle really. Its always been the most readily successful of my plays.

Why do you think the play’s been so successful?

It’s something that everybody recognizes, i.e., the character who is so kind and amiable and concerned about other people that he drives them crazy. And that sort of character exists all over the world. I went last summer to Budapest to see the play in Hungarian, where it was beginning it’s ninth season in this little theatre where they just bring it back every season. It was actually a very good production and a very good performance. I think everybody knows somebody like that or everybody feels that they themselves are a bit like that. I’ve not really come across a similar character in other plays, so in that sense it’s quite original.

You’re more likely to have a darker, more cynical character as a lead, as with The Misanthrope, because they tend to be more interesting.

The original idea for the play came because I was a student, and I was studying French and Moliére in particular. I was doing a dissertation on Le Misanthrope, and it just occurred to me at that particular point in history, which was 1968, where all the universities were exploding all over Europe, that somebody who’s the opposite of Le Misanthrope would be just as annoying in that sort of radical climate, and some of it is similar and some of it is deliberately, absolutely 180-degrees different. But all the way through the play I have internal references to The MisanthropeTartuffe

Do you have any plans to?

There was actually a spectacularly good translation by a writer called Tony Harrison that John Dexter did at the National with Alec McCowen, funnily enough, in the early ’70s, and I thought, well, that’d been done. But the thing about great plays is they need fresh translations every so often, so I haven’t entirely taken it off my list.

This is one of the few plays of yours that New York audiences will enjoy that isn’t a translation or an adaptation. Do you prefer doing plays in translation or your own original work?

I like doing my own original work, of course, but I’m very slow. I try and have a translation on the go almost all the time because you can do them quite quickly and you can put them down and take them up without having to maintain the sort of continuity of thought that you need for an original. They’re a great writing exercise, and it’s tremendously beneficial for your own work. I’m a sort of trained linguist, so it comes sort of naturally to me. David Hare once said he thought I was the only person he knew who’d used his education for some purpose.

Do you share Philip’s fascination with words and their origins?

Up to a point. Although I made Philip a philologist, it was a subject I particularly detested. In fact, I was so bad at it that this very nice man who taught me at Oxford asked me to leave class. I was hopeless. I was not interested in the historical origins of words or the historical development of declensions of verbs or all the stuff you had to know. But around that time the subject had a sort of resurgence because there was a lot of interest in the French theorists of language. Just at the moment when everyone was hoping that philology might go away behind a bush and die, it suddenly became a trendy subject again for a while.

   Of course as Valmont says in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, “Education is never a waste,” so you do learn somehow, subliminally, a bit about the origins of language and the development of language, and all that stands you in pretty good stead.

It helped you write The Philanthropist.

It certainly did in the sense of picking that subject, which I knew a certain amount about for my leading character. I was touched by the idea of Philip being interested in this deadly subject.

He is a touching character. You go back and forth between appreciating Philip’s niceness and wanting him to have a strong opinion about something.

And in a contrary way, Braham is absolutely odious, but he says some very amusing things that are quite thought provoking.

He definitely has the conviction of his opinions. In 2009, he would definitely have a blog.

It’s interesting. I updated a play of mine called Treats, which I wrote in the ’70s and was revived in London a couple of years ago. It was very easy to do that, and none of the reviews said it seemed out of place in 2006 or whatever year it was. But this play, is really, really set in its time. I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that.

Part of the play’s appeal to me is that it’s universal—in a time when a certain snarky quality dominates the tone in pop culture, Philip is a throwback to an era of kindness.

It’s absolutely true that web culture is dominated by unpleasantness of one kind or another, people being disagreeable to one another and judgmental in unattractive ways. On the other hand, the specific situation of the play has to do with that tension between the insularity of the characters and the world exploding around them. I just wanted to make a point about the fact that however terrible and outrageous events in the outside world were, there would be people sitting in Oxford University who were saying to one another, “This doesn’t make much difference to us.” While Treats< was a play you could manhandle into just about any age, The Philanthropist seems to me to fit at the end of the ’60s. I may be wrong, but that’s a very instinctive feeling.

Diane Snyder covers theatre for Time Out New York and other publications.