Recently it has been difficult to escape the idea that the time we’re living through is hell. Maybe it always was — but is that fact comforting, or does it make everything feel worse?
Susanna Fournier’s world premiere play take rimbaud, inspired by the titular French poet’s “A Season in Hell,” intricately juxtaposes historical and contemporary hells. Directed by ted witzel in a Howland Company production at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the show interweaves the tragic biographical facts of four writers (Sappho, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Sylvia Plath) with the realities of being an artist under late-stage capitalism.
Fournier imagines the aforementioned artists as living in Toronto from 2014 to the present. Rimbaud (Thomas Mitchell Barnet) escapes to the city to be with his lover, Paul (Julian De Zotti). Out of their affair, they begin creating an experimental film, The Story of Now, which falls apart as their relationship starts to crumble. Concurrently, Sylv (Ruth Goodwin) attempts suicide at an emerging writers program only to meet her literary hero Sapph (Rose Tuong), an established lesbian poet. The two (maybe) love each other, but Sylv also feels an intense desire to marry Paul, which she fears contradicts her desire to be a liberated woman writer.
Across these narratives, the play asks whether or not art is still capable of being revolutionary. Sapph describes “the good art thing” to Sylv — the rare feeling you get when you experience a work so transformative that it “sings… jumps off the fucking cliff… demands change.”
In one of the play’s fourth-wall breaks, choral critical theory lectures on capitalist ideology critique that “good art thing.” The cast namedrop staple postmodern/Marxist thinkers — Marx, Deleuze, Jameson, Zizek, and Fisher — and repeatedly refer back to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hegemony: the idea that everything is a part of capitalism, and therefore art is incapable of changing anything because it is fully integrated (both ideologically and often financially) within the system it frequently claims to oppose.
Rimbaud triumphantly counters the other characters’ critical theory-inflected pessimism — “I reject your obsession with historical materialism” — as he argues for the revolutionary need to “insist on beauty” in an ugly world. Later, Sapph rants about modern culture’s inability to produce anything new, and that the very play we are watching is nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia for a time when revolution felt possible.
Spiked with romanticism and brattiness, Barnet’s performance as Rimbaud perfectly contrasts with De Zotti’s Paul, who is slowly sobering up to practical concerns that arise when you choose art over career. Meanwhile, Goodwin’s Sylv is full of nervous anxiety about being an “emerging artist” and is experiencing an intense crisis of sexuality, which she tries to talk through with her therapist (Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster). Tuong, even more so, brings out the show’s unease about sexual identity. There is a deep discomfort, as well as comedy, in Sapph’s bewildered stares reacting to the attempts of their publicist (Hallie Seline) to market Sapph as an “LGBTQ woman”: “You are a survivor… we can sell that.”
One scene that brings the show’s ideas about the intersection of sexuality and politics to head is a reenactment of the Paris Commune, featuring a condensed account of its rise and fall. In 1871, the Communards (including Verlaine) declared Paris an independent state, and after two months it was violently suppressed by the French military. witzel’s direction manages to convey the shifting tides of power, where two to three actors collapsing after shouting “bang” feels epic in scope. Anachronistically, we see both sides talking about this violence like it’s a modern-day breakup; as the leader of the French Republic (Cameron Laurie) says to the main Communard (Breton Lalama), “I think we just want different things.”
The moment of the commune’s collapse is a mesmerizing confluence of acting, as well as sound (Dasha Plett) and lighting (Darren Shaen) design. Laurie sticks his fingers into Lalama’s mouth, as gunshot sounds ring and lights aggressively flicker. It associates the state’s violent suppression of the commune with sexual violence, further underlining Fournier’s fascination with the continuity between sexuality and politics.
The set and costume design (by Ting-Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart) impose the contemporary on the classical. Hanging above the action is a giant rendering of Sappho, designed to look like an ancient greek stone carving, with red blush projected (via light) on her cheeks, suggesting the ways 21st-century artists remake the ruins of the past. At key moments, the design pivots to sensory overload, featuring aggressive electronic drum grooves, a projected vomit of quotations from Rimbaud (in English and French), and colourful strobe effects. All of which would not feel out of place in a 2026 club that I would love to dance at.
Despite (and maybe because of) take rimbaud’s intense cynicism about hegemony’s capacity to swallow transgression, it did “the art thing” for me. While textually, it despairs about the limits of art, the production induces the anarchic sensation that anything is possible on stage. Perhaps we are “trapped in this forever,” as the full cast sings in a musical number, but across the play’s homologies between sex and politics and past and future there is also a testament to the frenzy of aesthetic experience, and the beautiful incoherence of being a young, overly idealistic artist with a burning desire to reject the past.
take rimbaud runs at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre until May 23. More information is available here.
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WRITTEN BY
Gwen Gabriella Caughell
Gwen Gabriella Caughell (she/her) is a transfeminine playwright and critic who lives in Toronto (formerly London, Ontario). Her favorite plays are the ones that are loud and difficult. She is fascinated by the intersection of aesthetics, queerness, and politics, and is currently working on her first full-length play “Dreamhouse/Dollhouse” with the support of the Paprika Festival.
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