The Human Voice 1.Numbers
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The human voice TABLE OF CONTENTS General information regarding the performance 3 Section 1 - Research 4 About the writer of the play - Jean Cocteau 5 Research for The Human Voice 6 Themes explored in the play 8 Section 2 - Inspiration 10 Set inspiration 11 Light inspiration 13 Section 3 - The process 15 About the character of the play 16 Set making 17 3d Exports 19 Experimentation with the window and shadows 21 Lighting plan 24 Focus list 25 Cue list 27 2 The Human Voice INFO LIST Project Name: The Human Voice Production Company: Open Arts Theatre Venue: Space Venue Address: Kosti Palama 12-14, 1096 Nicosia Premiere: Saturday 4 February 2017 Written By: Jean Cocteau Director: Athinetta Kasiou Set Designer: Lydia Mandridou Costume Designer: Lydia Mandridou Lighting Designer: Karolina Spyrou Sound Designer: Andreas Trachonitis Lighting Operator: Achilleas Mouskis Photography: Stelios Kallinikou Video: Natassa Charalambous CONTACT LIST Name Role Phone Email Athinetta Kasiou Director 99 461186 [email protected] Lydia Mandridou Set / Costume 99 585162 [email protected] Designer Karolina Spyrou Lighting 99317603 [email protected]. Designer cy Achilleas Mouskis Lighting 96 705965 [email protected] Operator 3 The Human Voice RESEARCH In every theatre project I take on, I like to find out as much as I can about the writer, the play (past performances, reviews), as well as the themes the play explores. This part of the process never changes for me. “The Human Voice” provided me with an opportunity to discover out how famous the play is and how Cocteau’s life influenced his work. A familiar everyday object, the telephone, can be used as a means of transmitting dramatic essence. The exploration of nostalgia of a lost love and communication can be used to provide a reflection of our own time. !4 The Human Voice JEAN COCTEAU (1889-1963) “Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French writer, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. He was one of the most multi-talented artists of the 20th century. In addition to being a director, he was a poet, novelist, painter, playwright, set designer, and actor. He began writing at 10 and was a published poet by age 16. He collaborated with the Russian Ballet Company of Sergei Diaghilev, and was active in many art movements, but always remained a poet at heart. His films reflect this fact. Cocteau was also a homosexual, and made no attempt to hide it.Cocteau made about twelve films in his career, all rich with symbolism and surreal imagery. He is now regarded as one of the most important avant-garde directors in cinema.” http:// Cocteau as a young man in www.longbeachopera.org/2016-season/la-voix-humaine the Twenties. Credit: REX Cocteau with Salvador Dali in 1923 Credit: REX “Cocteau's fascination with the rejected lover was not unique to Voix, but may extend back to his own love affair with the young Raymond Radiguet, who died suddenly at the age of twenty.”(Keith Clifton) https://www.erudit.org/revue/ cumr/2001/v22/n1/1014499ar.pdf Cocteau was described as : “passionate observers of women” (Benjamin lvry, Francis Poulenc (20th Century Composers) ) “Cocteau… whirled through life like an overgrown, opiated poodle, irritating as many people as he astonished, … the discourse of camp is evident in numerous ways, from his dandian dress to his outrageous films that pre- a n d p o s t - d a t e t h e D a d a movement.” (Benjamin lvry ,Francis Cocteau at his home in Paris in 1955 Credit: REX Poulenc (20th Century Composers)) “Cocteau, above all, intended to promulgate a new form of art, one free from Romantic and Impressionistic trappings” (Keith Clifton) https://www.erudit.org/revue/cumr/ 2001/v22/n1/1014499ar.pdf "Cocteau utilized his art as a personal exorcism or protection against reality instead of as an affirmation of knowledge” “microcosm of his mental structures” "Cocteau's theatre provides a much fuller, more complex insight into his mind than his films do.” (Lydia Crowson, The aesthetics Of Jean Cocteau) 5 The Human Voice ABOUT THE PLAY "Absolute silence ... accounts for the majority of the supposed conversation of the lover.” Jean Cocteau: opium, eroticism and the dark despair of La voix humaine “Alone in her chaotic bedroom, a dishevelled woman clutches the receiver of a Bakelite telephone. As the call is repeatedly cut off or Directed by Ivo van Hove crossed or the operator interrupts, she does everything she can to Performed by Halina keep her lover on the other end of the line. Reijn What matters to La voix humaine ’s impact is the ability to evoke the peculiar agony of losing love, expressed through the prism of the homosexual sensibility, with its ingrained streak of hysterical self- dramatisation and emotional masochism. In this respect, La voix humaine belongs alongside the plays of Tennessee Williams, the films of Pedro Almodóvar, and the ballads of Dusty Springfield as an exposure of the dirty linen of a woman's inner life, in which dignity goes by the board. Elle’s tactics are craven rather than heroic, and for all the genuine pain behind her isolation and desolation, Cocteau does not sentimentalise her behaviour: “the actress must give the impression of bleeding,” he wrote in a preface to the published text, “ of losing blood like a Claire Booth Credit: Polly Thomas limping beast, and ending the action in a room full of that blood.” For Cocteau, the play grew out of an even more intense period of crisis. It was written shortly after opium addiction had led him to detox in a rehab clinic, in the malestrom of a turbulent affair with a needy young writer Jean Desbordes, who would end up leaving Cocteau for a woman, joining the Maquis and dying after ghastly torture under the Gestapo. Desbordes was only one of a succession of such troubled young men who passed through Cocteau’s life .All too often, Cocteau was the one who was dumped. Some saw it as raw confessional: during a preview, the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard caused a great stir when he half-jokingly shouted from his seat “Obscene! Enough! It’s Desbordes on the other end of the line!” More objective critics felt that its naturalism indicated that the avant- gardiste Cocteau was selling out to commercialism – what was he doing, for instance, exploiting the trope of the telephone conversation, a clichéd feature of every tu’penny boulevard comedy of the 1920s? Conservatives, on the other hand, deplored that anything so vulgar should be staged at the Comédie-Francaise, otherwise home to the Ho-Jung in The Human Voice. Photo by Ed Krieger classical formalities of Racine and Molière. The net result of this controversy was the biggest popular success of Cocteau’s mercurial career to date – one that has persisted. Despite its provenance, La voix humaine shouldn’t be camped up: it’s too honest for that. It portrays a very ordinary romantic situation with sincerity and acumen and like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra or Sunset Boulevard ’s Norma Desmond, Elle emerges as the archetype of the woman who will stop at nothing to keep her man, even if it means her own destruction. Hardline feminists may find the implications of its stance unpalatable, but time has proved that La voix humaine shines a harsh clear light into a psychological darkness that can’t be ignored or gainsaid.”(Rupert Christiansen http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opera/ what-to-see/jean-cocteau-opium-eroticism-and-the-dark-despair-of-la- voix-hum/ ) __________La Voix Humaine is not so much a monologue as the audible half of a dialogue. 6 The Human Voice “A woman. A broken heart. A telephone. It is late at night and a distraught woman is on the phone with her former lover. Tomorrow he intends to marry (http:// someone else; however, tonight her hopes cling to their final conversation.” www.longbeachopera.org/2016-season/la-voix-humaine ) “Cocteau's text, vague and emotionally charged, is half silence, half sound, with large sections of the script filled with ellipses, creating wordless, unspoken moments. The unheard voice is that of the male lover, who remains mysterious and enigmatic, his significance to the plot entirely filtered through Elle. Certainly Cocteau was aware that such a work would present tremendous challenges for the performer, and so he employed another mute character, the telephone itself. Far from serving as a mere prop, the phone becomes at once the final palpable link Ingrid Bergman between the two former lovers, a phallic symbol, and a possible agent of suicide.”(Keith Clifton,https://www.erudit.org/en/ journals/cumr/2001-v22-n1-n1/1014499ar/) “…essential element in Cocteau's dramatic method, the technique of fragmentation…In many ways, Voix transforms the elliptical, fragmented medium of the telegram-one of Cocteau's most characteristic forms of expresssion—into spoken form.” (Crowson, The Aesthetic of Jean Cocteau) About Cocteau's Play________________________________________________________________ “Cocteau's experiments with the human voice peaked with his 1930 play La Voix humaine (The Human Voice). The telephone proved to be the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, feelings, and "algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication. La Voix humaine is deceptively simple — a woman alone on stage for almost one hour of non-stop theatre speaking on the telephone with her departing lover. It is full of theatrical codes harking back to the Dadaists' Vox Humana experiments after World War One, Alphonse de Lamartine's La Voix humaine, part of his larger work Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and the effect of the creation of the Vox Humana ("voix humaine"), an organ stop of the Regal Class by Church organ masters (late 16th century) that attempted to imitate the human voice but never succeeded in doing better than the sound of a male chorus at a distance.