LA VOIX HUMAINE
LA VOIX HUMAINE (The Human Voice), Sydney Festival at Bay 17 - Carriageworks; 9-13 January 2014.
There are shows that have "festival" stamped all over and La Voix Humaine is one of them. It's a monologue for one actress, written in 1927 by Jean Cocteau, in French, performed here in Dutch and surtitled in English In addition the company is one we would never see otherwise - Toneelgroep from Amsterdam. The director is its highly-regarded artistic boss Ivo van Hove and the performer is the equally highly-regarded Halina Reijn. It's just 70 minutes long and is set in a glass-fronted white box that reveals in painful, and occasionally comical, fragmented detail the one-sided phone conversation that documents the final gasps of an already dead relationship.
There can be few members of an audience - any audience - that don't recognise what is happening on stage in the brightly lit but sterile "room". In one corner is a toilet roll and a pair of men's black shoes. The woman has a phone receiver as her only companion. She is dressed in the uniform of depression: ill-fitting, daggy Adidas trackies, a grey t-shirt featuring a jolly Mickie and Minnie Mouse in rear view, a lumpy cardigan and thick socks. If she said not one word her appearance and slumped shoulders scream misery and despair although at first it's hard to know exactly why.
Nevertheless, the pieces of verbal puzzle begin to interlock for the audience as she alternately reels in and lets go her invisible and silent ex-lover - "If we get cut off, call me back", "No, I'm fine, really", "Are you there?" - to the point where it's almost possible to hear the howls of frustration as the emotionally manipulated ex bashes his head against a wall.
Part of the fascination of the piece is its truth. There is the hopeless hope of the forsaken and abandoned, the flighty laughter that contains no humour and the tremulous determination not to cry - who hasn't been there, done that? Halina Reijn - who also translated the play - gives a remarkable, sustained performance that becomes more and more controlled as The Woman gradually loses control and all pride and optimism. When she turns out the lights and reduces her living space to toneless half-light it's finally clear that she knows he's not coming back - and neither is she.
The play is washed by a score which is by turns melancholic and romantic but then is blasted with a bit of Beyonce in a mix that squeezes the human voice, in the room and on the phone, to the margins of hearing and communication. It's a neat metaphor, as is the fact that they're talking and being continually interrupted on a party line - something that was last featured in popular culture in Pillow Talk in 1959! Yet the 21st century equivalent is as familiar as the last mobile call you made that unaccountably dropped out. The more things change in the human condition the more they stay the same.
La Voix Humaine is quietly confronting, whether your last experience of being heavily dumped or being the dumpee was last year or in the last century. On any level it's a unique experience and one that will be hard to forget. Halina Reijn is wonderful to watch and Ivo van Hove's direction is a master class in simplicity - less is more when the stakes are so high. Not for everyone, but then this is a festival - and that's the way it should be.
