Review: “take rimbaud” is one hell of an experience

🔊 Play

Playwright Susanna Fournier’s one-of-one show take rimbaud is a feverish and visually arresting collision of poetry, performance art, and theatrical meltdown. The play is fueled by her fascination with poet Arthur Rimbaud’s ferocious self-destruction, combined with her own frustrations as a perpetually “emerging” playwright nearing 30.

This world premiere at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is not for the faint of heart. At its best moments, this fascinating show is a live-wire exorcism about the compulsion to keep making art long after the romance of being an artist has curdled into exhaustion, debt, and disillusionment. Yet this vibrant and anarchic production does not always cohere – and I could never quite decide if its dense volatility is a bug or a feature.

Directed with élan by Buddies Artistic Director ted witzel, take rimbaud takes place in a liminal space that straddles 2014 Toronto, 1871 France, and artistic hell. Audience members enter the theatre through a garage door to find a large and unfinished-feeling space facing two joined walls of audience seating. Performers are already within the performance area: sweeping floors, making final checks, and milling about in safety vests and headsets. When they signal that it’s time to start, the garage door drops, sealing in the spectators. The effect is immersive and a little unsettling – like being in an underground, even illicit garage venue. 

Fournier’s text, billed as “a performance poem for eight voices at the end of the world,” opens with a sort-of reading/summary of Rimbaud’s confounding poem A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer), then tangles together diverse elements – Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Sylvia Plath, Sappho, queer desire, unfinished films, failed artistic ambitions, a love triangle, and post-art-school malaise – into a sprawling meditation on whether art can still function as resistance in a culture that relentlessly commodifies dissent. 

Intellectually, this is smart, strong material. Dramatically, it is not always lucid. The production’s avalanche of references, historical overlays, and meta-theatrical gestures overwhelm at times and begin to feel impenetrable. take rimbaud dares you to keep up or be left behind (and it’s hard to keep up). Yet at the same time, Fournier’s writing contains memorable moments of startling clarity, including a beautiful meditation on the semicolon as both an elusive (and often misunderstood) grammatical device and a metaphor for artistic and emotional continuation.

Beneath the theoretical density lies the raw and true-feeling ache of young artists caught between abandoning their practice for the sake of survival or continuing down a path of burnout, emotional collapse, and self-destruction. Drawing inspiration and structure from A Season in Hell, Fournier re-tells the volatile relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine as both an artistic romance and a cautionary tale. She uses their self-destructive orbit to interrogate the enduring mythology of the suffering artist and the value of art itself.

The play’s layered, even archeological complexity makes The Howland Company an especially apt producing partner for Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Developed by Fournier over roughly a decade, and repeatedly rewritten as Fournier spent years pushing “notions of interdisciplinary theatre to its breaking points,” take rimbaud bears the marks of long artistic excavation, rather than tidy dramaturgy. Howland’s ensemble-driven practice and appetite for ambitious, intellectually charged and emotionally volatile work aligns naturally with Buddies’ longstanding commitment to formally unruly queer performance. The collaboration feels like an aesthetic inevitability: both companies are perfectly suited to this work.

You risk going a little mad if you focus too hard on following the plot … but even when dramatic clarity eludes, the atmosphere keeps us firmly in place. Set and costume designer Ting-Huan Christine Urquhart anchors the production with a functional and evocative design: a corner-shaped playing space layered with stairs and dominated by a towering metal scaffold that performers scramble up and down with restless urgency. The performers slide set pieces in and out as needed, maintaining the rough immediacy of devised theatre, while reinforcing the production’s garage-rock sensibility. Meanwhile, Nicole Eun-Ju Bell’s projections anchor us with periodic mentions of place and time, like “Toronto, 2014 / Paris, 1871 / hell, always”) or epigraphical lines, such as “This is why I quit art”. Combined with Darren Shaen’s shadowy lighting and Dasha Plett’s pulsing sound design, the impressionistic atmosphere buzzes with activity and creative friction.

I could spill a lot of ink on the individual contributions of the multitalented ensemble, but I will say simply that the actors are uniformly strong and convey Fournier’s heightened language and emotional whiplash with impressive commitment. In their various roles, Thomas Mitchell Barnett, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Julian de Zotti, Ruth Goodwin, Breton Lalama, Cameron Laurie, Hallie Seline, and Rose Tuong attack the material with ferocious conviction. They torture. They teach. And they find flashes of mordant humour and palpable vulnerability amid the theoretical density.

In the end, what lingers most about take rimbaud is its cumulative sensation of artistic desperation: the fear that making meaningful work may be impossible, the fear that the attempt may destroy you — and the equally terrifying possibility that abandoning the attempt might destroy you more quickly and totally. Fournier’s play sometimes disappears into its labyrinth of ideas, but even when buried deep inside its twists and turns, take rimbaud is a bold and fascinating confrontation with myths about the artist’s suffering, rebellion, and survival. As an audience member, it felt like a privilege to be invited into this arena: to wrestle with these ideas and internalize this unique experience. 

take rimbaud continues at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre until May 23, 2026. Tickets are available at buddiesinbadtimes.com. 

© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026