Twelve years in the making, Susanna Fournier’s take rimbaud is heartfelt, engaging, thoughtful, entertaining, and continuously funny.

The stage juts out into the centre of the room, with the audience kiddie corner along two walls. This means the action happens along two sides of the stage, and the result was more effective than I’d initially worried. The show held my attention throughout, which is rare in these days of attention deficit economy and speaks to ted witzel’s crisp direction.

The inspiration for the show was borne out of Rimbaud’s poem, “A Season in Hell”, written in his youth as he wrestled with his alienation as an artist in a bourgeois society. For Fournier, the poem captured the same bitter disappointment and frustrated fury she sensed in herself and her peers.

In Rimbaud’s time, France was at war with Prussia, and the cultural impact of that war in part gave rise to the Paris Commune, a socialist-led takeover of Paris until it was quashed by the French government. By contrast, we now have what Gramsci called hegemony: the idea that capitalism is so powerful that it has permeated everything. In other words, there is no way that our society can rebel against itself: any rebellion gets taken up as yet another product, an aesthetic, with no political impact whatsoever. What is art in this hegemonic context? How do we have impact? What do we do when our unique artistic contributions inevitably succumb to superficial packaging by some sycophantic brand manager?

The chaotic atmosphere of Rimbaud’s poem translates to the vibe of the play: trying to draw parallels between moments in history that seem unrelated, trying to make sense of the mess of history. Rimbaud’s political moment was so different, but it’s also normal to feel the fragmentation of the present moment and overwhelmed by how any particular moment of resistance feels futile.

The cast is cohesive with great chemistry and rhythm. Favourite moments include the scene where a publishing lackey tries to package Sappho’s (Rose Tuong) sexuality as a brand, and another scene where a woman (Ruth Goodwin) worries that getting married makes her basic, and that the inevitable roles of wife and mother will smother her art. Despite being somewhat haunted in the play by the image of Sylvia Plath, she does not ultimately succumb to hopelessness and suicide. What the play is saying about that precisely isn’t clear (does she have more resources, like therapy? Is there something about knowing of Plath’s fate that helped her evade it? Some secret third thing?)

Despite these lingering questions, the play itself has a momentum and vivacity that does, for a couple of hours, effectively fend off the numb apathy of hegemony. As to its lasting political impact, well, it’s about two hundred years too soon to tell.