Just as John Osborne burst onto the contemporary stage in 1956 with Look Back in Anger, so, a decade later, at the same theater, Christopher Hampton made his debut to similar acclaim with When Did You Last See My Mother". Comparison between the two dramatists is inevitable: both write in a style of modified realism; both deal with the problem of the social misfit; both portray characters who are ferociously articulate; and in much of the work of both there is a powerful political subtext. Yet Hampton is markedly of a different generation: one whose anger is under better control than that of Osborne's generation. Hampton's work is witty, intelligent, and carefully structured, and he has already provided a memorable body of plays.

Born at Faial in the Azores, Christopher James Hampton is the son of Bernard Patrick Hampton, a marine telecommunications engineer, and Dorothy Patience Herrington Hampton. He...