Royal Court Theatre
Total Eclipse
by Christopher Hampton
Swinging sensualist as an enigma
By Irving Wardle, Times September 12, 1968
If anyone has a right to the title of patron saint of the swinging sixties, it is Arthur Rimbaud who abandoned literature at the age of 20 after a systematic "derangement of the senses" by means of drugs, sexual experiment, crime, and poverty. Christopher Hampton's play, however, is described as "a study of the Rimbaud-Verlaine relationship", and the description is exact.
Apart from the fin de siecle psychedelic touch of a revolving metal chandelier, there is no attempt to draw any contemporary parallel ; the play is simply an honest and straightforward application of dramatic skills to the enigma of historical character.
It starts at the obvious moment of the 16-year-old Rimbaud's descent on the Verlaine household, and shows him easily dislodging his host from his uncomfortable marital prison. Thence we follow the pair through Bohemian Paris and their various frowsty digs in Brussels, in London, before Verlaine's attempts on Rimbaud's life and his prison sentence.
Throughout these scenes Mr Hampton (so far as I remember details) sticks very closely to the recorded events. At the end he branches away on his own with two sad reunion scenes: the first showing Rimbaud bidding his lover a conclusive farewell with three blows in the groin; and the second, set in the nineties, showing Verlaine as an absinthe-sodden wreck trailing about with a grasping old tart, and resolving not to surrender Rimbaud's manuscripts to his icily bourgeois sister who would probably have burnt the lot.
The usual comment on such dramatic exercises is that they fail to convey the genius of the characters - an objection that derives from a misunderstanding of what men of genius are like in private life. Mr. Hampton certainly does not show genius in action: neither poet is ever seen working, and the closest we get to the creative process is a fairy tale which Rimbaud tells while smoking opium.
But there is nothing incompatible between the poetry and the characters Mr. Hampton presents: he has had the sense to stick mainly to surfaces, and to create his drama from the conflict between a young monster armed with an indomitable inner sense of direction, and an incurabIy weak-willed masochist who cannot help spilling out confessions - some hilarious, some abject - and clinging to those he loves until they throw him off in disgust.
In the sense that his character changes and disintegrates as a result of the action, the play is more Verlaine's than Rimbaud's. But Mr. Hampton's real achievement is to bring to life a character which neither he nor anyone else can really understand.
Rimbaud, as Victor Henry plays him, is a cheerfully ruthless, foulmouthed visionary, much given to long quizzical stares and abrupt spasms of attack; always conveying a sense of immeasurable superiority, even after his renunciation of art, when he stands, head flopping over one shoulder, like a discarded marionette. John Grillo, repeatedly disclosing his hysteria and neurotic terror within a bearded Civil Service facade, has the easier part; but he manages to negotiate the tricky final scene without lansing into sentimentality.
MILTON Shulman at the theatre
Evening Standard, September 9, 1968
THE TEMPESTUOUS love affair between the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine would seem to have all the ingredients for a swinging, avantgarde play.
They were homosexuals who wrote like angels. They were visionaries who revelled in drunkenness, s q a l o r and debauchery. T h e y were bohemians with a contempt for bourgeois society and conformist culture.
They met when Rimbaud was 16 and Verlaine was 10 years older. And through Rimbaud's rompting Verlaine, a violent drunk who could set fire to his wife and throw his infant son against a wall, deserted his family to live for three years with his "great radiant sin."
Christopher Hampton's play Total Eclipse at the Royal Court in 12 scenes meticulously records the facts witch eventually led to Verlaine's shooting of Rimbaud and his imprisonment.
There are some neat1y devised dramatic moments, notably the first meeting of the two men, a gathering of artists and Verlaine's confrontation with his wife whose body he cannot resist.
Contrivance
But in spite of Mr. Hampton's snatches of felicitous dialogue, there is a note of literary contrivance about the whole evening whichputs one in mind of John Drinkwater's biographical plays spiced with some dirty words.Nor does anything on the stage ever remotely give one a hint of Gallic passion, temperament or squalor. It is all relentlessly Anglo-Saxon in feeling and when Rimbaud in a moment of high drama shouts to Verlaine. "Get a grip on your knickers." it is not Paris but Cambridge that floods in on us.
Victor Henry is not physically equipped to look like a cherubic 16 and if his interpretation of Rimbaud seemed weighed too heavily on the arch and jokey, it nevertheless had its effective moments.
John Grillo's Verlaine was stolidly masculine and although he conveyed the inner conflict of the man's passion he gave us no indication of any of the sensitivity that made it possible for him to be ranked one of France's great poets.
Total Eclipse
Sunday Times, September 15, 1968
At the Royal Court Christopher Hampton's Total Eclipse is an easy-going, jog-trot study of the sexual relations between Rimbaud and Verlaine. Mr Hampton, whose "When Did You Last See Your Mother?" showed him to have considerable talent, romanticises the story. He finishes his play with a scene of excruciating sentimentality, in which Verlaine dreams that Rimbaud kisses the palms of his hands, into which earlier he has driven a knife.
Mr Hampton shirks facing an essential aspect of the relationship of the two men, in which one was extraordinarily beautiful, and the other not. At the Court they are both pretty much of a muchness, each being moderately less handsome than the average man in the audience. There is no suggestion of the facts that underlay Rimbaud's exclamation "tout haut en plein caf�... 'Qu'il se satisfasse sur moi, tr�s bien! 'Mais ne veut-il pas que j'exerce sur lui? Non, non, il est vraiment trop sale et a la peau trop d�goutante!" This explains a good deal about Verlaine's infatuation that the play leaves obscure. There is an excellent, revolting, and touching speech in which Verlaine recalls that as a boy he tried, and failed, to destroy the remnants of his mother's three miscarriages. Otherwise the play is the sort of naturalism which shows that the conversation of men of genius is as flat as that of the rest of us.
Total Eclipse at the Royal Court
By Derek Malcolm, Guardian September 12, 1986
THOSE who find the study of an artist's character to be a positive disadvantage to an understanding of his work may find Christopher Hampton's "Total Eclipse" something of a mixed theatrical blessing. The play, the second of the Royal Court's new offerings this season, examines the rumbustiously muddled homosexual relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine - the one with so much talent that he could be forgiven anything, the other just stupid enough to be blamed for everything. That, at any rate, seems to be a part of Mr Hampton's view, and one which the director, Robert Kidd, and his actors underline.
The two make a sad pair, and do not often suggest that so much could have come out of their love-hate relationship with each other. But it did, as a selection of their poems, translated by the present author and used as a programme note, makes clear. And though I am all for using language which comes alive to the audience of its day, I do not think "Get a grip on your knickers" is quite what Rimbaud would have said to his ageing sugar-daddy in a tantrum.
But this is by no means a bad play, and not to be sneered at. Mr Hampton's portrait of mutual dependence is full of real insights, eminently actable and so very rarely dull. It is put together with some if not all the spare skill that Robert Bolt showed with "A Man For All Seasons." If it is written from the standpoint of Verlaine rather than Rimbaud (and thus rather less absorbing than it might have been the other way round) ot possesses both compassion and a sense of humour. Mr Hampton is clearly going to write a very good play indeed one day.
Victor Henry is excellent as Rimbaud, despite the handicap of having to pretend to be 19. John Grillo plods gamely through his part as Verlaine and creates more and more from it as the evening progresses. Michele Dotrice, daughter of Roy, has a very good scene or two as Verlaine's puzzled wife. The whole production is, in fact, first class. It undoubtedly has something to bite on.
Life in Poets Corner
THEATRE by J. C. TREWIN, September 21, 1968 - The Illustrated London News
ALTHOUGH THE PRESENT censorship of plays does not end until next week, theatres seem to be holding an advance celebration. Certainly both Total Eclipse (Royal Court) and Spitting Image (Hampstead Theatre Club) might have come from a dramatists' freedom group, even if, as plays, they are completely different: one a serious study of the relationship between the French poets, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine; the other a farcical fantasy in which a partner in a homosexual "marriage" gives birth to a son.
Christopher Hampton, author of Total Eclipse and now the Royal Court's house dramatist, may not clarify the character of Rimbaud for us - who can blame him? - but he has devised capably, in the episodic portrait-play manner, a narrative of that four years friendship during the 1870s: the obsession of the indecisive, oversexed Verlaine with the callous, demonic prodigy who seeks, by various means, deliberately to disorder the senses, and who rejects poetry altogether at an age when most youths are just hesitantly coming to it.
As a document, apart from the blend of hospital and courtroom in the fourth scene of the second act, Mr Hampton has contrived it almost in the method of the 1930s. His writing, in today's manner, is often needlessly unrestrained, unselective, and some of it adds little to our knowledge of the characters. The strongest scene is the last, in 1892, seventeen years after the dreadful parting. Here the burnt-out Verlaine, huddled over his absinthe at a Parisian caf� - something that would have much shocked Marie Corelli who called one of her novels Wormwood - listens to Rimbaud's resolute sister demanding back her brother's manuscripts. We know that they will never reach her. Verlaine, an old man, though not much over 50, remains possessive.
The play does not persuade us of the talent of the two men, and I do not think a dramatist can be excused altogether by the plea that he is writing, as it were, of genius off-duty. There should be more indication than we get that these strange figures were able to rise to the work Mr Hampton has now rendered excellently - in a booklet that accompanies the Royal Court programme. If they were not labelled as Verlaine and Rimbaud, the conflict between them could seem tiresomely protracted; as it is, we wait throughout in hope of illumination.
Verlaine would recall the ruthlessly boorish Rimbaud - who might be a child of our own day - in the phrases that Mr Hampton has translated:
Your radiant name will always sing in
glory,
Because your love for me was what love
should be.
Victor Henry does for the youth as much, probably, as any actor could, especially during the opening scenes when he is only 16 or so. John Grillo establishes Verlaine, debauched and self-torturing sensualist. He is at his surest in the Brussels affray, and later in the epilogue when he sits crouched at the caf�, listening to Rimbaud's sister - acted firmly by Gillian Martell - or swallowing his absinthe, calling to his mistress, and muttering as one who barely remembers, "That was a long time ago."
Robert Kidd has directed the play at a sharp pace, though I am not particularly happy about the method of scene-shifting, which does endanger the atmosphere. One device is delightful - the use of a swinging Moorish-style lantern that, when it is raised before each of the acts, fills the theatre with a race of tumbling shadows.
