Review: The Human Voice, Charing Cross Theatre

Review: The Human Voice, Charing Cross Theatre

Summary

Rating

40

Ok

This revival of a 1958 opera feels a lost opportunity to introduce the genre to a new audience.

Jean Cocteau’s 1928 The Human Voice has had a bit of a renaissance in recent years. During lockdown, Pedro Almodóvar made his first English language movie, a version starring Tilda Swinton. Earlier this year, Ivo van Hove directed Ruth Wilson in a new version at the Pinter Theatre. Back in 1958 and with the approval and assistance of Cocteau, Francis Poulenc turned it into a short opera; La Voix Humaine. Charing Cross Theatre now presents this for five performances only, starring soprano Natalia Lemercier.

The smart set, by Andreas Skourtis, is simple, with a piano and couch surrounded by curtains. We begin with two women lying on the floor, one gets up and moves to the piano (Elspeth Wilkes), and the other (Lemercier) goes to the telephone where she speaks to her departed lover who is due to marry another woman within the next day. Both are dressed the same in matching pyjamas and matching hairstyles, seemingly to suggest they are the same character, the spurned woman.

Lemercier is accompanied at the piano by Wilkes and for a brief moment by Kevin Giles on clarinet. Everything is so very restrained it’s almost dry. That’s not a comment on the talent but on how this production is delivered. It doesn’t help that they have chosen to stick with the original, old dial phone and so Lemercier spends almost all of her time with this held up. The Human Voice is about a woman who is abandoned by her lover and is desperate. It is ripe for an explosion, for stirring passion but here it just… is.

The blurb describes the production as “an overwhelming account of love, and love’s ending” and that’s what this should attain, with operatic power. Instead it falls flat, lacking in tension. It leaves a not insignificant chunk of the audience disengaged and even a couple of people departing through the set’s curtain. In seeing this production I was keen to explore what opera can offer, but throughout I just kept waiting for it to begin. It’s only in small moments where Lemercier is belting it out, strong, powerful and operatic that I felt any great connection with the narrative. This feels like a lost opportunity and I left disappointed.

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Director: Alejandro Bonatto
Musical Director / Pianist: Elspeth Wilkes

The Human Voice plays at Charing Cross Theatre until 30 December. Further information and bookings can be found here.