TOTAL ECLIPSE. To 27 May.
London.
TOTAL ECLIPSE
by Christopher Hampton.
Menier Chocolate Factory To 27 May 2007.
Tie-Sat 8pm Mat Sat & Sun 3.30pm.
Runs 2hr 30min One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7907 7060.
www.menierchocolatefactory.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 March.
Restrained revival works best round the edges.
Despite appearing at a former sweet-making factory, Total Eclipse isn’t a new brand of dark chocolate. It’s the 1968 play by Christopher Hampton, the second of his plays to be revived right now in London that deals with an abusive relationship. This one, though, is more specific than that in Treats.
Poet Paul Verlaine had quit his job during the political aftermath of the 1871 Paris Commune when he met revolutionary poet Arthur Rimbaud in the 1870s. Just as Rimbaud’s difficult new style would eclipse everything Paris had understood by verse, so his powerful physical and temperamental attraction eclipsed Verlaine’s apparently comfortable bourgeois married existence.
Paul Miller’s production economically stages Hampton’s play on a narrow strip between two audience blocks. This throws the emphasis on the actors though also depriving the action of much by way of context. Which would be fine if the close-up-and-personal manner created more character depth.
Though Daniel Evans’ Verlaine stares keenly at the teenage poet, his defence of him against his wife and her family seems like the excuses of the infatuated, rather than exploring how much admiration for man and poetry influence each other. And Jamie Doyle’s Rimbaud is a clear bad boy of modern lit, defiant and intolerant. But it stays unclear how much this is artistic impatience with life, how much adolescent spite.
Hampton shows Rimbaud’s toughness with his own art; when he has no more to say he stops writing and is shortly after dead, following a period as a businessman. But the impassioned lunacy of the pair, the cruelty it aroused between Verlaine and his wife, are lightly touched in this cool production.
More noticeable is Hampton’s bookending of the central male relationship by women. There’s Susan Kyd equally fine as Verlaine’s mother-in-law unable to cope in her polite mode with Rimbaud, then in loser, loucher mode as Verlaine’s companion Eugenie, keeping his weaker personality on a tight-rein.
And, as Verlaine stumbles with his ever-present absinthe into older age, Wendy Nottingham dominates the final scene as Rimbaud’s quietly assured, utterly conservative-minded sister, seeking to eclipse her brother's scandalous literary remains.
Paul Verlaine: Daniel Evans.
Arthur Rimbaud: Jamie Doyle.
Mme Maute de Fleurville/Eugenie Krantz: Susan Kyd.
Mathilde Verlaine: Georgia Moffett.
M Maute de Fleurville/Etienne Carjat/Judge Theodore T’Serstevens: Ronald Markham.
Charles Cros/Barman: Angus McEwan.
Jean Aicard/Clerk: Tom Marshall.
Isabelle Rimbaud: Wendy Nottingham.
Director: Paul Miller.
Designer: Paul Wills.
Lighting: Hartley T A Kemp.
Sound: Sebastian Frost for Orbital.
Composer: David Shrubsole.
Costume: Julie Bowles.
2007-04-04 00:10:12