About the work
Colleague Crampton is a five-act comedy, Gerhart Hauptmann's first attempt at comic writing. He got the idea in November 1891 after seeing Molière's The Miser performed in Berlin; the model for the title character was the Breslau painting professor James Marshall. It premiered on 16 January 1892 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, with the comic actor Georg Engels in the title role.
Plot
The highly gifted but alcoholic painting professor Crampton founders in the petty, narrow-minded world of his art school. He neglects his duties, is dismissed, and sinks further into drink before his daughter and a former pupil pull him back.
Cultural significance
Contemporary critics received the comedy in 1892 as an effective character study; it is seen as marking Hauptmann's turn from naturalistic drama toward character comedy in the line of Kleist and Molière.