A salon piece of chamber opera, IT’S STILL HER VOICE is a mash up of Poulenc’s opera La Voix Humaine written in 1958 inspired by Cocteau’s play of the same name (The Human Voice) written in 1928.
The main prop in the original play was a telephone, a single woman clutching the receiver speaking with her departing lover, forsaken, despairing, suicidal.
The audience enters the space and is confronted with two women one collapsed on the floor, chair upturned, a red telephone on the table that also contains a bottle of vodka and a vial of pills.
The other woman is sitting, anxiously scrolling a mobile telephone. Within her space is a table with a red telephone, a bottle of gin and a vial of pills.
In IT’S STILL HER VOICE we have mobile phones and land lines, crossed lines, disruptions, drop outs, and texting.
IT’S STILL HER VOICE is sung in French and spoken in English, with surtitles projected on a screen. Karina Baily is the soprano, full throated and trippingly on the tongue. She does much of the heavy lifting. Pollyanna Nowicki is the actor. Alas, it feels she is competing against the singer rather than complimenting or consolidating. Music Director and accompanist is Antonio Fernandez.
The director of the piece, Kate Gaul calls the production an experiment and that is what it is. A noble one at that, mixing up opera and drama and examining the way the telephone, mobile or fixed, is part of the way we live and die.
As it was then, as it is now, our relationships are both enabled and limited by technology and breaking up is so hard to do. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
IT’S STILL HER VOICE plays Saturday March 5 7pm and 9pm at The Flying Nun, Brand X corner Palmer and Burton, Darlinghurst.
