The Human Voice

 I've seen several iterations of Cocteau's The Human Voice but never on stage, and I wondered how it could be staged. It's an hour's worth of half a conversation spat into a telephone, after all. An interesting problem to solve without hard edits and close-ups. The direction here is delicate and subtle, teasing out the story, unraveling it even as the protagonist snags her thread and unravels before us, negotiating, as she staggers round an unmade bed, an ashtray, a record player, a lot of spilled vinyl, and an abandoned travel bag. The travel bag is important. It lies there, its guts spilled across the floor. It is our protagonist franked with the Longchamp logo, emptied out, literally, as we later find out. She's going nowhere except for this lonely orbit round a soiled mattress. Another, pristine holdall, in Stephen Libby yellow, squats by the doorway, packed full of the last vestiges of a relationship, the relationship she's talking through on the phone right now. 

Her first words are, "Fuck sake."

It should be said, from the outset, that Nicky Harley is incredible. It's a star turn. She starts, benumbed, padding stiff-legged in ever-decreasing circles and, as the show continues, goes through her transformations like Tam Lin: pleading, furious, pragmatic, sentimental, terrified, accepting, never accepting. It's like she's rattling through the seven stages of grief, and shuffling the pack as she goes. On top of this, we get a secondary telephone call from her work - she's a social worker - and we see the other tine of her fugue state, the detailed pragmatism of her work persona. At intervals throughout the play, after moments of emotional extremis she's obliged to do her job over the phone. The physical transformation from her absolute desolation to resigned reiteration of the same information she has given again and again, is extraordinary. She is protean. She's the show. Luckily, she's the only one in it. 

I don't review a lot of theatre these days, as you can probably tell. But when there is something different, a brave, unusual choice, then I am obliged to attend. This was all of that, and happily contained the performance of the year. 

It's February, and yet I'm pretty confident I'm right.