"IT is an absolute phenomenon in France." explains Christopher Hampton, Art's translator. "It's been years since there's been a play that people have paid attention to as a play, as opposed to a production. In France, as in Germany, for the last 20 years the stars have been the directors. Writers just don't flourish in those circumstances."
Christopher Hampton first hit theatrical headlines in 1965. He was still an undergraduate at Oxford reading languages when a student production of his first play When Did You Last See My Mother? marked him out as a precocious talent. A call from the Royal Court Theatre followed; the translation of Uncle Vanya they were working on needed help. He became the Royal Court's playwright-in-residence, and over the next five years worked both on translations of European classics and his own plays, an unusual double-act in those days. The pattern has continued for the last 30 years. Whatever else he's doing, writing plays or screenplays, or directing, he always likes to have a translation on the go.
Although he has translated Moliere, Horwath, Ibsen and Chekhov, he is probably best known for Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Art, written by Yasmina Reza, is the first time he has translated a play by a living author.
Ten years ago he failed to persuade the Royal Shakespeare Company to take on Reza's first play, Conversations After A Funeral, which he hadn't seen but which somebody had sent him. The next time he came across Yasmina Reza's name was outside a theatre in Paris in 1984. To his great surprise he discovered Art was a sell-out and had to queue for a return. It was worth it.
"It was so truthful and so funny, so I called my agent and said `can you make some inquiries'. Sean Connery proved to have the rights. His wife, who is French, had seen the play so he had bought them. Very cannily too." A few days later Hampton got a call from Connery and a year later the three-hander opened in London's West End to huge critical and popular acclaim. Now into its second cast, Art is still playing to full houses, the quality of the play perhaps even more apparent without the original, starry cast of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay.
On the surface Art concerns the price-tag placed on contemporary art - in this case a minimalist painting which would appear to have no intrinsic worth beyond the artist's reputation. Within that framework, the play is an exploration of friendship, its values, worth and cost.
Translators, believes Christopher Hampton, should only take on playwrights with whom they have a natural affinity. "Good writers will tend to drive towards whatever is most individual in the language, they tend to colonise it and make it their own and that is why translation is so difficult." Art itself has echoes of Christopher Hampton's own hit play of the 1970s, The Philanthropist.
"It's not like translating a novel. It's trying to make a play live in front of an audience and trying to get the resonances that the original author wanted it to have. And it's quite a specialised job." It can also take a very long time. "If you do very close work on a play that is a masterpiece, it can take years."
Hampton believes strongly that the art of translating is very undervalued. "I don't feel hard done by personally I can protect myself - but I think translators are generally extremely badly done by, get paid very little and do a tremendously important job."
"The crucial thing is you're not trying to improve the play in any sort of way. You re Just trying to present it as self-effacingly as you can. I am particularly sensitive to that because my own plays have been so buggered around with in translation."
He so hated a translation of The Philanthropist in Paris that he stopped a production. ("It caused a great to do.") He once tried to walk out of a play in Basel. "I was stopped at the front door. They pointed out it would be rather impolite to leave. I said that if I stayed I would be rather more impolite. And indeed I was. There were tears before bedtime I'm afraid: an actor tried to punch me. So I know the dangers."
It never came to fisticuffs with Yasmina Reza ("Iranian father, Hungarian mother, totally Parisienne") but, admits Hampton, it wasn't easy. "She's an extremely severe task-master. Any defects in her English did not inhibit her from expressing her opinion quite forcibly. She was absolutely fanatical, and very vigilant that there wasn't any fantastification."
Where Yasmina uses an invented word, so too does Hampton. Some things defy translating. The most obvious is the setting itself. "There was a line of thought that we should reset the whole thing in London. Right from the very start I refused, because I can't see three English friends having a row about art anyway.
Some words don't translate either. In the final speech in the original text, one of the three friends describes himself as a "ludion". "Yasmina didn't quite know what it meant herself. The actual translation is a bottle imp. Of course, in English Ivan can't say he feels like a bottle imp, so we cut it altogether in the end."
Humour, the nuances of social class betrayed in accent and vocabulary, can present huge difficulties to a translator. Art, in Christopher Hampton's translation is very. very funny, wit crackling over the surface of a really quite tragic play.
"I think Yasmina was a little bit startled by the amount of laughter. But I laughed a lot when I first saw it. And I never forgot that." In fact the biggest belly laugh of the evening is Hampton's own. It isn't a mistranslation, just his verbal translation of what in French had been a silent, but oh-so eloquent Gallic shrug.