Significant People: David Campton

This is a guide to the playwright David Campton and his association with Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre in Scarborough.

David Campton & Theatre run the Round at the Library Theatre

by Simon Murgatroyd

"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."
David Campton

General Biography

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 organised 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.

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 Are 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.

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.

David received an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leicester in 2006, the year of his death.

David described his own writing as:

"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.”

Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre Biography

David was a founder member of the Studio Theatre company at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, and is considered to be the company’s first resident playwright. During the company’s first ten years of existence, he and Alan Ayckbourn would be responsible for a considerable part of the company’s new writing output.

Stephen Joseph first met David at one of Stephen’s playwriting course weekends. As a result of this, Stephen decided one of David’s plays was suitable to produce in the company’s first season. This would begin a trend of at least one Campton play being produced by the Studio Theatre company each year until 1965. He has the honour of being the only male writer to be featured in the first season at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre with his play Dragons Are Dangerous.

David took a more active part in the company from 1957, when he not only became the resident playwright but also acted with the company - incidentally the same year Alan Ayckbourn joined the company. He appeared in 21 plays between 1957 and 1963 including Alan Ayckbourn’s first two plays.

David and Stephen had a strong relationship and David was very much influenced in his writing by Stephen Joseph. Arguably this led David to write many of his early plays in the style of what would be dubbed ‘Comedy Of Menace’. Stephen firmly believed that David was going to be his break-out writer and David’s plays were featured in the Studio Theatre’s ill-fated Sunday Club venture in London (a weekly theatre club run by Stephen during the winter months which lasted just two seasons).

David’s work was well-received and John Russell Taylor writes extensively about him in the influential book Anger And After, which offers a fascinating insight into the state of British drama from the mid ‘50s to early ‘60s. Taylor concludes that Campton and Pinter have much in common and the main reason Campton’s work was not better known was being based in the north of England.

In 1962, Studio Theatre Ltd moved to Stoke-on-Trent to open the first purpose built round theatre in the country at the Victoria Theatre. David’s play Usher was included in the debut season and David was involved in the company from 1963 until 1966.

Like Alan, David was also encouraged to direct by Stephen and he directed two plays for the newly formed Scarborough Theatre Trust (the Studio Theatre company at that point having moved to Stoke-on-Trent). He directed Usher in 1962 and Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels in 1963 at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre.

David acted as the general manager of the Scarborough company in 1959 and 1963, before he left Scarborough to work for the Victoria Theatre - although he would have plays produced during the next two years in Scarborough. His close association with Stephen continued and he was particularly forthright in his support for Stephen and in defending his artistic legacy. On Stephen’s death in 1967, David was responsible for Stephen’s estate and he gave Stephen’s papers to the University of Manchester.

Alan Ayckbourn on David Campton

"Stephen Joseph's passion for encouraging writers from within the company is well documented. At one stage the two front runners for the Most Produced Playwright in a Season Award was shared between David Campton and myself. Sometimes our plays literally alternated in repertoire for months on end - his blend of light comedies and 'comedies of menace' with my own early frenetic farces.

"Besides writing we also performed regularly in each other's plays. It soon became a matter of honour to try and write each other the ultimately unplayable, unrewarding - acting role - preferably as humiliating and physically uncomfortable as possible. We also became adroit at creating for each other unrecognisable or oft repeated cue lines combined with long tortuous speeches with impossible thought changes.

"But I have to concede that David was clearly the winner in all this. My own lame attempts to cause him discomfort by having his character regularly struck with blunt instruments or drenched in water, flour, treacle, soot and other substances (all strictly to further the dramatic action, you understand) was as nothing compared to his own sadistic streak when it came to writing roles for me. Amongst these, a one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed barman who, quite apart from having to stand on one leg for 40 minutes, was also required to dispense rapid drinks one-handedly whilst engaging in quick-fire repartee with the customers (those of them I could actually make out with my restricted vision). Another time I played an entire two hander with a paper bag on my head opposite an actress similarly attired. (A tip: try never to move your head. If you do, the paper tends to crackle and you can't even hear what you're saying, let alone your co-star). I can still taste soggy brown paper to this day (Thanks, David). No wonder my acting career never took off.

"Probably the best/worst role he ever wrote for me, though, was a homicidal, 108 year old female cook/nanny trapped in a nuclear bomb shelter with two young protégés (the cook had long ago served up their parents for dinner). The character talked incessantly in a series of totally un-learnable non- sequiturs that made Beckett seem straightforward by comparison. I wore a ton of padding including foam rubber legs the size of tree trunks, an unyielding starched uniform, an off the peg grey wig and a false nose that regularly dropped off as the perspiration flowed down my mottled yellow make-up. Great role. Great prospects.

"And people continue to ask me, do I still want to act?"
Alan Ayckbourn 2001

David Campton Plays produced at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre, Scarborough

* indicates world premiere

All the plays listed below were produced at Theatre in the Round at the Library Theatre, Scarborough.

1955 Dragons Are Dangerous * (Director: Stephen Joseph)
1956 Idol In The Sky * (Director: Stephen Joseph)
1957 The Lunatic View (Director: Rodney Wood) comprising Memento Mori, A Smell Of Burning, Getting And Spending and Then...
1958 Ring Of Roses * (Director: Stephen Joseph)
1959 Frankenstein * (Director: Stephen Joseph)
1960 View From The Brink (Director: Stephen Joseph) comprising Out Of The Flying Pan *, Soldier From The Wars Returning * and Mutatis Mutandis *
1961 Four Minute Warning (Director: Stephen Joseph) comprising Mutatis Mutandis, At Sea and Little Brother, Little Sister
1961 Stranger In The Family * (Director: Terry Lane)
1961 The Boys And The Girls * (Director: Alan Ayckbourn)
1962 Usher * (Director: David Campton)
1963 Comeback * (Director: Stephen Joseph)
1964 Dead And Alive (Director: Stephen Joseph)
1965 Cock & Bull Story * (Director: Stephen Joseph)
1972 Carmilla * (Director: Alan Ayckbourn)

Article by and copyright of Simon Murgatroyd. Please do not reproduce this article without permission of the copyright holder.