David Campton (2 May 1924 – 9 September 2006) was a prolific British dramatist who wrote plays for the stage, radio, and cinema for thirty-five years.
Campton worked with Stephen Joseph in developing theatre in the round in the United Kingdom, and played a major role in establishing theatre-in-the-rounds in both Scarborough, North Yorkshire (now in the well-known Stephen Joseph Theatre, a converted 1930s Odeon cinema) and Staffordshire in the English West Midlands.
Campton always credited himself with giving a young Alan Ayckbourn one of his first jobs at Scarborough with the immortal words, 'watch me my boy and one day you might become a playwright like me!'
At the age of seventy-six, he directed and appeared in one of the plays he had previously written for Stephen Joseph at Scarborough, Passport to Florence, with a group of amateurs, ACTWS, in Leicester.
In performance reviews published in the short-lived British drama magazine Encore of productions of Campton's play The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace and Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, drama critic Irving Wardle borrowed the term "comedy of menace" from the subtitle of Campton's play, popularizing the term "comedies of menace".