La Voix Humaine Theatre Review

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    PETER TAGGART

    La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice)

    When the great filmmaker and humourist Nora Ephron passed last week, a quote of hers started

    doing the rounds of social media – “Be the heroine of your own life, not the victim”. Just two days

    after her death, in the middle of Motherboard Production’s edgy reimagination of Jean Cocteau’s

    1930 masterpiece La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), the third play of La Boite’s indie season, I

    couldn’t help but be reminded of the quote. Cocteau gives us a woman attempting to have one last

    phone conversation with her former lover, before he is to be married. Frequently interrupted by

    drop-outs and crackling distortion down the line, we voyeuristically look upon a woman struggling to

    become the heroine of her own life, while still clearly the victim of a love affair that can no longer

    be.

    Set in a small apartment in Paris, the conversation is entirely one-sided. We never see or hear the

    man on the other side of the phone. We are only privy to the woman’s reactions and her building

    anxiety and desperation, Director Dave Sleswick gives us three women in the one role (Erica Field,

    Noa Rotem and Liesel Zink) and tips out a grandiose bag of theatrical tricks, weaving dance and text

    and music and video into the work and addressing the needs of a modern audience, accustomed to a

    certain degree of audio/visual stimulation.

    The set is an open room with doors at either. It’s modern and clean and totally sparse, like someone

    robbed a lounge display in IKEA. Made possible by Pozible, the ever-popular crowd funding website,the set may be almost bare, but it’s extremely clever in its simplicity. Screen doors at the back of

    stage open and close, allowing video and slides to be projected from behind and strobe lighting

    borders the stage, occasionally flashing, illuminating the actors faces from below. Credit must go to

    Brad Jennings and Steven Maxwell for the frequent and smooth incorporation of multimedia and to

    Verity Hampson, for an incredibly smart lighting design.

    Erica Field is such a bold performer and manages to perfectly execute balance between a totally

    naturalistic vocal style and a sort-of vaudevillian physicality. Often her face is so expressive it seems

    as if the words are mere accessories. She is a delight to watch. Noa Rotem delivers the majority of

    her lines in Hebrew, with subtitles beamed onto curtains hanging above the set and the screen doorbehind her. At first it is distracting, even a little frustrating as our focus is forced to dart between the

    action on stage and the words up above. However, Rotem is perhaps the most compelling when she

    exposes us to the anger and madness her character experiences when cut off from her lover at the

    other end of the wire. Though differences in personality tend to be subtle and few, Liesel Zink brings

    a fragility and sexuality to her interpretation. Zink is particularly graceful on her feet, carrying us

    through much of the modern dance throughout the play.

    The choice to have stage directions and revealing elements of the story read out by Field at the

    beginning and some of the dance pieces seemed unnecessary, though never long enough to become

    truly tiresome. That said, Sleswick has delivered the most exciting production of La Boite’s indie

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    (and, perhaps, mainstage) season so far, creating a tragic, striking and effortlessly energetic work

    that goes far beyond the devastation of poor phone reception.

    Rating: Four Stars 

    La Boite Indie and Motherboard Productions present

    La Voix Hum aine (The Human Voic e)

    By Jean Cocteau

    Directed by Dave Sleswick

    Cast: Erica Field, Noa Rotem & Liesel Zink.

    La Boite

    June 27  – July 14, 2012.

    For tickets call 07 3007 8600 or purchase online via laboite.com.au