La Voix humaine, Beachcliffe Apartments, opera review: 'Handled with thought-provoking skill'
An intimate living room presentation of Poulenc's 1958 operatic monologue by the inaugural Cardiff Festival of Voice
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Your support makes all the difference.The string of broken telephone conversations that is Francis Poulenc’s 1958 operatic monologue La Voix humaine chart the abandonment of a woman by her lover with painful, allegoric intensity. Ultimately, despite her pleading self-abasement, there are no crossed lines in the exchange: he has left her for another woman. But is he a figment of her imagination?
In director David Pountney’s highly intimate, living-room production, it is a pre-recorded piano (beautifully played by Christopher Glynn), rather than orchestra, that becomes the lover’s disembodied voice. We are invited to a party at an apartment and greeted individually by soprano extraordinaire Claire Booth, who enacts with wringing plausibility a transition from gracious hostess to desperate would-be suicide.
We become props – handed hors d’oeuvres, a phone, a bottle of pills – as the woman, called L, moves about the room, and witness to her dawning, aching loss. The face-to-face combination of theatre à la Cocteau’s original 1928 play and pop-up opera is winning. Sung in Richard Stokes’s English translation, outburst, apology and lyrical reminiscence become disturbing rhythmic-mental contrasts.
Do we support L or abandon her, too, in her despair? The ending of this gripping presentation by the inaugural Cardiff Festival of Voice is handled with thought-provoking skill.
Till 11 June. A Welsh National Opera / Wales Millennium Centre co-production: wmc.org.uk: 029 2063 6464
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