David Campton; playwright

[Hyfler/Rosner]

The Times September 21, 2006

David Campton
June 5, 1924 - September 9, 2006

Playwright inspired by the Theatre of the Absurd

DAVID CAMPTON was a prolific dramatist who wrote for the
stage, screen and radio for 35 years. While his plays
achieved little national popularity, they were usually
intelligent and easy for an audience to grasp.

He was one of the first British playwrights 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. "It seems to
me," Campton wrote, "that the chaos affecting everyone
today - political, sociological, religious - is so
all-pervading that it can only be approached through comedy;
tragedy demands firm foundations." Campton's quartet of
plays, A View from the Brink, was performed for an audience
of marchers on the way to Aldermaston in 1960.

Though generally short, most Campton plays were elegantly
constructed and showed great verbal ingenuity. They also
accomplished what they set out to do, even if they never
began to have the same impact as the work of Harold Pinter,
who was exploring similar themes and techniques.
Campton had successes in the West End with One over the
Eight and On the Brighter Side. Timesneeze, a play for
youth, was performed by the National Theatre in 1970, and in
1971 Jonah was commissioned for Chelmsford Cathedral.
David Campton 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 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.

Among Campton's hundreds of plays, Incident (1962) was a
parable on racial prejudice; Soldier from the Wars Returning
illustrated the effects of war; and Then . . . had a physics
teacher and the reigning Miss Europe as the sole survivors
of a nuclear holocaust.

David Campton, playwright, was born on June 5, 1924. He died
on September 9, 2006, aged 82.