The quiet Englishman

There can be no English playwright or screenwriter quite as perversely productive as Christopher Hampton.

This is a writer who has driven himself through a nearly unbroken 35-year career in serious British theatre while simultaneously conjuring smash West-End hits out of anti-populist material, pulling off memorable TV adaptations born of heavy literary fiction, and making it big with Oscar-winning, critically acclaimed movies about cruel French dandies and sad English aesthetes. His latest big-budget cinema adaptation, of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, begins filming next March with Michael Caine.

That's only the success side of his story, of course. What goblins, snarling at Hampton's heels, have driven him to write a further 25 screenplays which never made it to the cinema?

In person Hampton doesn't sound remotely fanatical. Gentle, relaxed and courteous to a fault, his most immediate concern is a new French play by Yasmina Reza, which he has translated for the National, and the lightness of touch it takes to make the English laugh at philosophical subjects. It was the pairing of Reza, an astringently intellectual Parisian, alongside Hampton's sang-froid that a few years ago transformed a modest play about art theory and friendship into the hottest comedy on the London stage. Four years and 12 casts later, the success of Art baffles both writers. Receiving an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Comedy in 1996, Reza pointed out that it was meant to be a tragedy.

Hampton was perhaps a little more accustomed to the mysteries and surprises of translation. In the adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses he had proved that a work of French literature, consisting only of correspondence, could be transformed into a hit play and an Oscar-winning movie. If there is a secret behind Hampton's relentless scribbling, it is that most of it consists of translation; of poetry into plays, biography into fiction, literature into movies.

But he stops short of claiming to have transformed Reza's text from tragedy into comedy. "Yasmina is very vigilant; she's not going to let you get away with anything. In Art we even cut a couple of lines because she felt they were getting illegitimate laughs. There was a joke about psychiatrists which did get a laugh in London, and then she thought it would get an even bigger laugh in New York, so she took it out. And I think she's right to be suspicious, because translations can deform a piece of work."

Life x 3, opening at the National next week, starring Mark Rylance, Harriet Walter, Oliver Cotton and Imelda Staunton, does not at first look set to be a new Art. The action of the play is repeated three times during a dinner party held by an astrophysicist. As the outcome changes with each act, Reza seizes her opportunity to pose some dark philosophical dilemmas.

Hampton believes that as Life x 3 transfers from France to England, so the emphasis will change. Does he mean to say that they have already been laughing at a play about philosophy in Paris? "Oh yes, but not as much as they're going to laugh in London."

Life x 3 will be Hampton's fourth collaboration with Reza - after Art, The Unexpected Man and Conversations After a Burial. Meanwhile, Hampton continues to pursue a relationship with Hollywood, despite the agony. Once, with his screenplay for Carrington, he was asked by a studio executive: "Why do you want to make a film about a woman who falls in love with a faggot and then kills herself?" And that film was a success. Others have bombed: Total Eclipse, Mary Reilly, The Secret Agent.

But Hampton is indefatigable in his desire to translate his literary interests into the adrenaline hit of American narrative, forever pursuing the rush he got from Dangerous Liaisons. Next year, while Tales From Hollywood, his satire of 1940s Los Angeles, is revived for the Donmar Warehouse, filming starts on his adaptation of The Quiet American. The last time he touched on the history of Vietnam, adapting Neil Sheehan's Bright Shining Lie, the plug got pulled.