La Voix humaine, Beachcliffe Apartments, opera review: 'Handled with thought-provoking skill'

An intimate living room presentation of Poulenc's 1958 operatic monologue by the inaugural Cardiff Festival of Voice

Claire Booth performs La Voix humaine (Polly Thomas)

The string of broken telephone conversations that is Francis Poulenc’s 1958 operatic monologue La Voix humaine chart the abandonment of a woman by her lover with painful, allegoric intensity. Ultimately, despite her pleading self-abasement, there are no crossed lines in the exchange: he has left her for another woman. But is he a figment of her imagination?

In director David Pountney’s highly intimate, living-room production, it is a pre-recorded piano (beautifully played by Christopher Glynn), rather than orchestra, that becomes the lover’s disembodied voice. We are invited to a party at an apartment and greeted individually by soprano extraordinaire Claire Booth, who enacts with wringing plausibility a transition from gracious hostess to desperate would-be suicide.

We become props – handed hors d’oeuvres, a phone, a bottle of pills – as the woman, called L, moves about the room, and witness to her dawning, aching loss. The face-to-face combination of theatre à la Cocteau’s original 1928 play and pop-up opera is winning. Sung in Richard Stokes’s English translation, outburst, apology and lyrical reminiscence become disturbing rhythmic-mental contrasts.

Do we support L or abandon her, too, in her despair? The ending of this gripping presentation by the inaugural Cardiff Festival of Voice is handled with thought-provoking skill.

Till 11 June. A Welsh National Opera / Wales Millennium Centre co-production: wmc.org.uk: 029 2063 6464