On the deck of a deserted ship, two poets converse amid a tangle of human voices and video images. As it happens, they are Verlaine and Rimbaud. This fantasmagorical opera by Normand Chaurette and Dominique Pauwels is codirected by the incomparable Denis Marleau and Stéphanie Jasmin, who invest it with the eerie, otherworldly quality that has brought them international acclaim.

Two silhouettes meet on the deck of a deserted ship: Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. In this phantasmagorical setting, the two itinerant poets fall into conversation, their words skittering along the elusive boundary where language becomes sound, reality blurs into fantasy, and bodies are made of flesh and dreams. On another deck, a child is sleeping, rocked in his mother’s arms, as her hypnotic song rises and falls in time with the waves.

In the dwindling light of a vanishing childhood, the motifs of travel, sleep, the ocean and illumination come together and drift apart under the pen of leading Quebec playwright Normand Chaurette. Scored by Dominique Pauwels, longtime associate of Belgian director Guy Cassiers (whose staging of Rouge décanté was presented at the NAC), Chaurette’s libretto calls for two female singers, an instrumental ensemble, a children’s choir and a women’s choir.

This production of Chaurette’s 21^st‑century opera bears the matchless directorial stamp of Denis Marleau and Stéphanie Jasmin: eerie and unsettling, with characters appearing live and on video, suspended in time, trapped in the surreal setting of a ship locked in the ice.