A Rimbaud review – legendary poet’s unlikely transformation into entrepreneur is as odd as ever
US experimentalist Patrick Wang here curates an intriguing if very austere experience, a theatrical-style one-man show about the eventful life of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, presented as a microbudget epic of nearly three hours, an episodic piece taking place entirely within a “black box” stage space, ventilated occasionally by back-projection videos of the great outdoors.
Australian actor Blake Draper plays Rimbaud, with an English accent tinged occasionally with scouse, speaking to a range of invisible characters including his mother, his sister and his lover and artistic comrade Paul Verlaine, whose voices are represented by musical instruments. But fundamentally this is an extended, bravura monologue.
As a young aesthete, Draper’s Rimbaud sports floppy long hair (very different from the spiky short cut from the famous portrait photo) and he declaims his poetic yearnings while lounging and preening and pouting. It is at the stage that he is escaping from the stultifying home town of Charleville for Paris, near-penniless and experiencing nights in jail; it is in the city that he meets and has an ecstatically transgressive relationship with Verlaine. But the second act of Rimbaud’s life, for which he cuts his hair and grows a moustache, sees him put poetry and amours behind him, embarking instead on a new and equally demanding career: as an export merchant in Cyprus and Africa.
It’s a diverting spectacle, yet for all the vehemence and the commitment of the performance, it’s not easy to gauge precisely what makes Rimbaud change his mind and art as radically as he does from poetry to commercialism. This new career is pursued with a vigorous mature competence and severity of which his previous life had given no hint. And even that first half of his life, the era of literature, is a little opaque here, given that Rimbaud was, after all, a published poet; his relationship with his public is not clearly represented. A distinctive, demanding experience of mysteries unsolved.
