First seen in 1968, Christopher Hampton's play about Rimbaud and Verlaine has matured well. What is startling, given that Hampton was only 22 when he wrote it, is its cool classical restraint. After all, this is a play about a tempestuous affair between two male poets in which we never see either writing poetry or making love.
In Paul Miller's intimate, traverse-stage production, the disquieting nature of genius comes across particularly strongly. We first see Rimbaud as an ill-graced 16-year-old, accepting an invitation to stay in the home of the married Verlaine's in-laws. After the boy wonder has insulted his hosts and pinched several books, he and Verlaine embark on an intense two-year affair that culminates in the older man's attempted shooting of his lover. Yet, 20 years on, Verlaine remains haunted by the memory of Rimbaud.
It is a structurally formal play, with six matching scenes in each act, that depicts a violently turbulent affair and the nature of creativity. Ultimately, the question it asks is: why write? Rimbaud, the idealistic self-appointed visionary, stops in his late teens because he has nothing more to say: Verlaine, dedicated to the craft of poetry, continues because "truth is infinite".
As so often in Hampton's plays, what we see is the externalisation of the author's own internal conflict. Hampton finally sides with Verlaine, who assiduously preserves the work of his intemperate, self-absorbed lover.
Neither man, however, is sentimentalised, and Miller's production admirably preserves the balance of antipathy. Daniel Evans reminds us that Verlaine is a weak, indecisive drunk, unforgivably cruel to his wife and imbued with a complacent melancholy. Jamie Doyle's Rimbaud, meanwhile, is a cocky dogmatist who is filled with the arrogance of genius. Without judging the characters, both actors excellently present their flawed natures, and there is good support from Susan Kyd as Verlaine's mother-in-law and Wendy Nottingham as Rimbaud's tight-lipped sister.
The final scene, amounting to an epilogue, too obviously imparts a lot of biographical information. But it also makes a crucial point: that Verlaine was the real romantic, who, in his woozy recollections of the young Rimbaud, proves that absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.
· Until May 27. Box office: 020-7378 1712.
