Tuesday, September 15

Tag: The Human Voice

The Seven Deadly Sins and The Human Voice – Charing Cross Theatre
London

The Seven Deadly Sins and The Human Voice – Charing Cross Theatre

I am not an opera regular, so I arrived at this double bill with a certain curiosity about what it might feel like to encounter two works from very different European traditions, Germany and France, almost a century after they were written. This contemporary staging by Alejandro Bonatto offers an accessible entry point, presenting Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins alongside Francis Poulenc and Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice. Synopsis: In The Seven Deadly Sins, Anna travels through American cities in pursuit of enough money to build a house, negotiating the expectations of her family and the moral compromises required to survive. The Human Voice follows Elle through a single telephone conversation with a former lover, as an attempt at connection gradually exposes emot...
The Human Voice – King’s Arms, Salford
North West

The Human Voice – King’s Arms, Salford

The insistence of a telephone ringing can be annoying, “Answer me! Answer me!”, it cries. Yet when it stops and there is silence, that is worse. A phone call is the perfect metaphor for a play about disconnection. Callers can be cut off and find themselves shouting into the void, searching for someone to talk to. We all want to find someone with whom we can connect. Jean Cocteau saw the theatrical benefit of the phone call with his play La Voix Humaine in 1930. At that time the telephone was the only way for two people to communicate at a distance. The main problem with adapting the play and setting it in the present day is that there are now so many ways for two people to “talk” to each other that the last way they would do it is to speak over a landline. However, I am willin...