London Broadway Review
Total Eclipse
by Matt Wolf
Another superb foray from Welshman Daniel Evans into the world of 19th-century France isn't enough to make a satisfying evening out of Total Eclipse, the Christopher Hampton play that frequently gets revisited—though rarely to satisfying effect. I missed David Hare's much-lauded 1981 London revival of this 1968 play, which had Hilton McRae and Simon Callow in roles here filled by newcomer Jamie Doyle and two-time Olivier Award winner Evans. But whether one's exposure dates back to the 1984 off-Broadway production (co-starring a then barely known Michael Cerveris as Rimbaud) or the 1995 film adaptation co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis, the work itself is never quite as fiery—or, frankly, as sexy—as one keeps expecting it to be, even if Evans's empathic powers, whether as Georges Seurat or his near-exact contemporary Paul Verlaine, offer a continued fascination all their own.
It's a shame, then, that so much of the emphasis in Paul Miller's traverse staging for the Menier Chocolate Factory—a bisected space for a play devoted largely to bisexuality—should be given over to Doyle's Rimbaud, an adroit performance of a fairly despicable character whom all the pouty insolence in the world can't make engaging. When first seen, the teenage Rimbaud has arrived at the Parisian home of Verlaine, 10 years his senior, though the age difference hardly prompts much from this Rimbaud by way of politesse. "Listen, I must have a piss," he says within minutes of imposing himself on designer Paul Wills' sparely if elegantly appointed set. And though one's initial reaction is to side with the opinion of Verlaine's father-in-law that this newly arrived upstart is a "hooligan" and little more, Rimbaud is soon sharing a bed with the hard-drinking, married womaniser, Verlaine—the sort of fevered individual who can remark, "I'm faithful to all my lovers," and, one feels, mean it. Prone to violence (his preferred weapons are the fist or, in one celebrated instance, a gun), Verlaine meets his match in Rimbaud, who likes to open the palm of his supposed lover and then suddenly stab at it. Strange behaviour? Try telling that to a cold-eyed figure who goes so far as to tell us, "I'm too intelligent to be happy." Which doesn't exactly make for an evening of erotic exaltation.
Indeed, as directed by Miller, the characters rarely talk to one another when they can bark their lines, though, playing Verlaine's mother-in-law, the supremely stylish Susan Kyd does wonders with the flash of an eye. It's entirely possible that the youthful Hampton who wrote the play was drawn to the breathless impetuosity of Rimbaud and never bothered to consider how you make engaging a character who—stripped of his famous name—would barely be tolerated on stage or in life. Doyle has the right sullenness for the part, if the script is any guide, and he even looks somewhat like the Rimbaud one has seen portraits of. But there's not much going on behind the dead eyes of someone whose poetry, we're told, wasn't as good as his bone structure—in which case, were Rimbaud around today, he'd likely be a difficult but dazzling employee at London's new Abercrombie and Fitch outlet.
Evans has the better role and runs with it, though I can't say he and Doyle ever generate much heat. If anything, one feels the two literary lions drawn together by a consuming contempt, much of it self-directed, that can find no other outlet. Surely, neither is a stranger to the physical flare-ups of an existence which find Rimbaud, on the one hand, having been sexually assaulted by four drunken soldiers, while Verlaine isn't beyond striking his wife. (Georgia Moffett has the play's most thankless role.) But Evans, much more fully than Doyle, brings humanity to the table, even amidst exchanges in which one word ("sodomist") gets corrected to another ("sodomite"). And the Menier's onetime neo-Impressionist painter brings a Pointillist's detail to a poignant final scene rife with reported incident (mostly about Rimbaud's untimely demise) but scant on drama, as if a smitten Hampton wanted breathlessly to keep company with two men only to find that, as is often in the case, three is very much a crowd.
Total Eclipse
By Christopher Hampton
Directed by Paul Miller
Menier Chocolate Factory
Original page here.
by Matt Wolf
Another superb foray from Welshman Daniel Evans into the world of 19th-century France isn't enough to make a satisfying evening out of Total Eclipse, the Christopher Hampton play that frequently gets revisited—though rarely to satisfying effect. I missed David Hare's much-lauded 1981 London revival of this 1968 play, which had Hilton McRae and Simon Callow in roles here filled by newcomer Jamie Doyle and two-time Olivier Award winner Evans. But whether one's exposure dates back to the 1984 off-Broadway production (co-starring a then barely known Michael Cerveris as Rimbaud) or the 1995 film adaptation co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis, the work itself is never quite as fiery—or, frankly, as sexy—as one keeps expecting it to be, even if Evans's empathic powers, whether as Georges Seurat or his near-exact contemporary Paul Verlaine, offer a continued fascination all their own.
It's a shame, then, that so much of the emphasis in Paul Miller's traverse staging for the Menier Chocolate Factory—a bisected space for a play devoted largely to bisexuality—should be given over to Doyle's Rimbaud, an adroit performance of a fairly despicable character whom all the pouty insolence in the world can't make engaging. When first seen, the teenage Rimbaud has arrived at the Parisian home of Verlaine, 10 years his senior, though the age difference hardly prompts much from this Rimbaud by way of politesse. "Listen, I must have a piss," he says within minutes of imposing himself on designer Paul Wills' sparely if elegantly appointed set. And though one's initial reaction is to side with the opinion of Verlaine's father-in-law that this newly arrived upstart is a "hooligan" and little more, Rimbaud is soon sharing a bed with the hard-drinking, married womaniser, Verlaine—the sort of fevered individual who can remark, "I'm faithful to all my lovers," and, one feels, mean it. Prone to violence (his preferred weapons are the fist or, in one celebrated instance, a gun), Verlaine meets his match in Rimbaud, who likes to open the palm of his supposed lover and then suddenly stab at it. Strange behaviour? Try telling that to a cold-eyed figure who goes so far as to tell us, "I'm too intelligent to be happy." Which doesn't exactly make for an evening of erotic exaltation.
Indeed, as directed by Miller, the characters rarely talk to one another when they can bark their lines, though, playing Verlaine's mother-in-law, the supremely stylish Susan Kyd does wonders with the flash of an eye. It's entirely possible that the youthful Hampton who wrote the play was drawn to the breathless impetuosity of Rimbaud and never bothered to consider how you make engaging a character who—stripped of his famous name—would barely be tolerated on stage or in life. Doyle has the right sullenness for the part, if the script is any guide, and he even looks somewhat like the Rimbaud one has seen portraits of. But there's not much going on behind the dead eyes of someone whose poetry, we're told, wasn't as good as his bone structure—in which case, were Rimbaud around today, he'd likely be a difficult but dazzling employee at London's new Abercrombie and Fitch outlet.
Evans has the better role and runs with it, though I can't say he and Doyle ever generate much heat. If anything, one feels the two literary lions drawn together by a consuming contempt, much of it self-directed, that can find no other outlet. Surely, neither is a stranger to the physical flare-ups of an existence which find Rimbaud, on the one hand, having been sexually assaulted by four drunken soldiers, while Verlaine isn't beyond striking his wife. (Georgia Moffett has the play's most thankless role.) But Evans, much more fully than Doyle, brings humanity to the table, even amidst exchanges in which one word ("sodomist") gets corrected to another ("sodomite"). And the Menier's onetime neo-Impressionist painter brings a Pointillist's detail to a poignant final scene rife with reported incident (mostly about Rimbaud's untimely demise) but scant on drama, as if a smitten Hampton wanted breathlessly to keep company with two men only to find that, as is often in the case, three is very much a crowd. Total Eclipse
By Christopher Hampton
Directed by Paul Miller
Menier Chocolate Factory
Original page here.