The journey from Cocteau’s play through Poulenc’s musical setting into production and onto the stage has been aifascinating one and continues to be so as the work is explored over and over again.

Like all outstanding pieces there is a depth and richness which can be interpreted so many different ways. Ultimately it must remain for the audience to make up their own minds and for the performance artists to pose the questions through their actions.

Simply put, there is no package, no solution, but there is an evolution as two things are explored.

First the thing that fascinated Cocteau. Does one person know exactly what another person is thinking or saying if they cannot see that person? Cocteau was intrigued with the idea that by using a telephone we can play roles, change our vocal delivery, pretend, act, and bely our true feelings because the person listening cannot see us. In other words we can lie most effectively.

Secondly who knows within any relationship how or when it will end? Nothing can be permanent. So much depends on how the relationship started and how long it can remain in service to both parties.

We were confronted with the obvious which when explored became less and less obvious. There are so many subtle ways the twists can be brought about. So we have to ask a lot of questions which the audience can only answer to themselves.

Who is this woman?

Is she simply a person who entered into a relationship with a lawyer, and now that he is going to make a socially advantageous marriage and wants her out of the apartment he provided, is she broken up because she never anticipated this would happen and has made no provision for herself?

Does she not understand that she does not fit in to his social strata and has been merely his mistress not his companion?

His clothes, his dog are all in the apartment we are seeing, yet he lives in his own apartment with his manservant Joseph looking after him. So does that make the woman and the apartment simply a site for rendezvous and assignation?

If his mother wants the apartment back, are his family ‘cleaning out’ his life prior to a socially fortuitous marriage? Is she the thing to be purged out of his past to clear the way for his future?

Is the woman that we see manipulating for her own security or playing an emotional blackmail game to frighten him into coming to her? He cannot see her he can only hear her.

Are her threats of suicide, sleeping pills, strangulation, real? He cannot see her he can only hear her.

Is he really her entire life or is he one of several who have kept her?

As she is getting older does she not understand that men want younger women as their mistresses as a reassurance and sign of their own virility?

Does she anticipate this is going to happen and is playing a cruel game of emotional blackmail?

She thinks he is at home, he is actually in a cafe. Why is he calling her from neutral territory?

When does it strike her that she really does have to go?

The great joy of working with Merlyn Quaife and Len Vorster is that both artists are prepared to explore again and again the alternatives and variable interpretations. They are happy posing questions to the audience and challenging the obvious and seeking the layers of subtext which makes Cocteau’s original such an outstanding piece to begin with.

Possibly having its seeds in Cocteau’s missing Marseilles year, when as a young man he disappeared into the port city and its vices, the play was originally written for a young male actor but the Comédie-Français could not allow that. Is it autobiographical of Cocteau and his manipulation of wealthy men who could help him get established in literature and theatre? Or is it, as has been strongly suggested the result of a break up with a young person he himself was mentoring.

Either way the central character is neither the woman nor the two invisible men it is the telephone as the instrument through which people hear but cannot see each other.

Poulenc, who suffered at the hands of a possessive mother as much as Cocteau did, developed an empathy with the text and his setting takes us into the electrical currents and circuits and short circuits of the mind. Sometimes tranquil sometimes, romantic when memory overtakes the present, then jangling again with the sharp pain of fear and frustration.

La Voix Humaine—The Human Voice remains a mystery and a great vehicle for artists but most importantly it is aigreat vehicle for audiences to join their minds together with the artists who are interpreting and the artists who created. It is like a telephone line a bridge in time and distance, full of pulses and impulses. Like the Parisian telephone party line network itself we are all joined together to the unseen by the unseen. We are all individuals in our own little space joined into a chain.

But do we always tell each other the truth?

© 2006 Blair Edgar