Absinthe Boys

By T.E.K.

TOTAL ECLIPSE by Christopher Hampton

In this drama passion is bondage, genius nestles in madness and two men become each other's heaven and hell.

Destiny left simple happiness out of the script in fashioning the relationship between the French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. One might say that Rimbaud wrote the major part of the script. Claiming that the poet's task is to be a seer, Rimbaud while still in his teens demanded "a long, immense and deliberate derangement of all the senses, the poet seeking every possible experience of love, pain and madness . . ."

Absinthe is the catalyst. It turns Verlaine (David Markay) violent and makes Rimbaud (Nicky Silver) into a satanic enfant terrible. Transforming his mentor into his slave, Rimbaud pries Verlaine loose from his wife and son. The rest of their tempestuous saga is fairly accurately chronicled in the production at off-Broadway's La Mama Theater. The play is flawed, but it is amazing that British Playwright Hampton (The Philanthropist) wrote it when he was only 18. He was obviously drawn to Rimbaud as a fin-de-sicle spiv, and Silver plays him that way. Markay's Verlaine is the more richly shaded portrayal, ranging from voracious sensual appetite to a discernment of the gemlike flame with which Rimbaud's poetry would burn in posterity's eyes.

--T.E.K.

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