Questions and Catharsis Channelled from Cocteau, via Motherboard.

I acknowledge that this post was originally written for Critical Mass as part of the Brisbane Festival.

20 September 2011

Written by: Cullan Joyce Date: 20 September 2011

Photo courtesy Brisbane Festival

This is a delayed post because I needed to take my time with this play. Normally, if I started this ‘review’ with the sentence: ‘The production was insignificant’, this would be taken as a criticism of a production. But it is not intended in this way.
Motherboard’s production of La Voix Humaine fell into the work and expressed the play so well that themes, questions, and feelings expressed violently in the original seemed to emerge onto the stage without impediment.
Jean Cocteau’s play La Voix Humaine examines what might be the last telephone call made between a woman and her former lover. His physical presence is removed by his use of a telephone to communicate. We encounter a woman waiting for a call from her former partner.
It is the absence of his face from her which is a source of her trauma and panic. She cannot be near him. The mediation of her lover by telephonic distance has reduced him to a mere voice, which still possesses a terrible power over the character. His absence allows him to potentially control or destroy everything of worth to her.
What we are drawn into is her attempt to maintain her own sanity, which has become obsessively linked to this capriciously absent lover: she loves him too much to accord him the blame for the break down of their love, but she cannot bear for him to leave her.
Her love for him, which previously preserved their relationship, has now begun to destroy her, and she flails about, unable to live or move beyond her room or her memories except to proceed to the roof to contemplate suicide. She has become completely powerless and yet she is without blame (though she desires to accept all blame).
The play ends—spoiler alert—with the character remaining in a limbo consisting of her memories and her anticipation of future calls by her lover; she waits perched on the roof, unable to move, unable to live without him, unable to take enough control of herself to die. She has turned into a wraith preserved by ghostly memories of their time together.
I left the theatre angry over the questions of relationships and the role that electronic mediation affects conversation. I was made to feel how Cocteau’s play expressed his idea of contemporary tragedy. The genius of La Voix Humaine is that its tragedy offers no grand or cataclysmic choice or resolution for the heroine. The production drew us into Cocteau’s nether world in which, despite the quantity of choices available for contemporary communication, the removal of the person causes a dislocated drift into the mnemonic desperation of the character portrayed by Erica Field.
Whatever might be said about the play being performed by one person, there are clearly two characters in it—one physically present to the audience and the other absent being visible through the conversations of the actor. We are entreated to imagine him using similar mechanisms to her—fantasy, opinion, we speculate on his motives. This makes the work of portrayal and production difficult and challenging for any production or audience. How can I portray two persons in one?
Erica was able to brilliantly express the strange amalgamation of the absent and the present characters in her performance. The staging was effective; moments such as the stripping of the bed and the placement of microphones were both powerful and subtle in turn. Dave Sleswick and Motherboard team deserve a great deal of praise, and Under the Radar needs to be commended for bringing them to us. The production team were able to express profoundly the tensions and pain within the character and the themes in the work.
This production enabled the play to speak again; it allowed its audience to feel the pain and the humanity of the players and the tragedy of the situation. The use of different media devices helped to keep the flow of the work moving, preventing any loss of momentum during the sections of tension or conflict.
However some things, I felt, did not add to the production’s overall success. A couple of details could have been left out of the production without this harming the significant power of their work; some projections were slightly misleading or distracting. Additionally, some of the music, to my mind, dulled moments of significant tension.
There is a Chinese saying which goes: when you are fishing, it does not matter if you miss the fish’s mouth by an inch or a mile, in neither case do you succeed in catching it. However, as this play hooked me, any criticisms are pretty insignificant really. It was the most fulfilling experience I have had in the festival so far.