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Samuel French London |
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"Realizing that a play in a drawer is of no use to anyone, and that, being an ephemeral thing, it will not wait for posterity to catch up with it, I have always written with production in mind.
"The circumstances of production have varied from the village hall, through radio and television, to the West End stage. (Though representations on that last has been confined to one-act plays and sketches.) This has also meant that my plays have varied in kind from domestic comedy, through costume melodrama to — as Irving Wardle coined the phrase — 'comedy of menace'." |
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"My profession is playwriting, and I hope I approach it with a professional mixture of art and business. The art of playwriting is of prime importance; I hope I have never relegated it to second place. I have never written a play 'because it might sell'. Everything I have written has been clamouring to be written and as long as I have been able to make marks on paper, there has always been a queue of a dozen or more ideas waiting their turn to achieve a solid form. But an idea can always be developed towards a particular medium, be it experimental theatre in the round or an all-female group performing in a converted schoolroom." |
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David Campton was a prolific dramatist who wrote for the stage, screen and radio for 35 years. He was born in Leicester in 1924 and educated at Wyggeston Grammar School. He served in the RAF from 1942 to 1945 and in the Fleet Air Arm for a further year. After serving as a clerk in the City of Leicester Education Department until 1949 and with the East Midlands Gas Board until 1956, Campton won first prize in a competition organized by the Tavistock Repertory Company. He received an Arts Council bursary in 1958 and prizes from the British Theatre Association in 1975, 1978 and 1985.
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His first full-length play, The Cactus Garden, was produced by the Everyman Repertory Company, Reading, in 1955 and in the same year his comedy Dragons and Dangerous was staged at Scarborough. When he left the gas board he signed a contract with Associated-Rediffusion and wrote children's programmes as well as episodes of The Groves and Starr and Company. |
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Receiving an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leicester in 2006
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Leicester Mercury columnist and BBC Radio Leicester presenter John Florance described Mr Campton as a good man who touched a lot of people's lives and was dearly missed. He said: "David Campton was part of the generation of dramatists from the mid-1950s, bracketed with the likes of Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and John Osborne.
"He was very influenced by Pinter and I think performed in the second production of The Birthday Party with Alan Ayckbourn and Pinter himself. |
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"He worked with Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where they were both resident dramatists. They remained great friends. "He wrote hundreds of plays and there is hardly an amateur dramatic company in the country which won't have done one of his plays at some time. "What I liked about him was that he always thought the best of people. He radiated benevolence and goodness. "When you look down the list of his work it is quite phenominal. |
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David Campton with his wife, Sylvia
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| "I dislike pigeonholes and object to being popped into one. However, one label that might fit is the title of an anthology of my plays: Laughter and Fear. This is not quite the same as comedy of menace, which has acquired a connotation of theatre of the absurd. It is in fact present in my lightest domestic comedy. It seems to me that the chaos affecting everyone today — political, technical, sociological, religious, etc., etc., — is so all-prevading that it cannot be ignored, yet so shattering that it can only be approached through comedy. Tragedy demands firm foundations; today we are dancing among the ruins." |  |
He was one of the first British dramatists to write in the style of the Theatre of the Absurd. Owing something to Ionesco, these works took the form of parables, conversations between couples or threesomes with an underlying dread of the effects of the Bomb.
Campton's quartet of plays A View from the Brink, was performed for an audience of marchers on the way to Aldermaston in 1960. |
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David and Sylvia
taking part in French's birthday quiz in June 2005 |
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| Full Length Plays currently in print in French's Acting Editions
The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace. Includes: A Comedy of Menace, Then ..., Memento Mori, Getting and Spending (produced 1957; Then produced 1980) The Life and Death of Almost Everybody (produced 1970)
Sketch Resting Place (produced 1969 as Mixed Doubles) |
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One Act Plays currently in print in French's Acting Editions
After Midnight — Before Dawn (produced 1978) |
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David Campton at
French's 175th birthday celebrations in June 2005 |
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