The Burton Taylor Studio has been transformed into a Tracy Emin mixed-media installation. There’s a bed in the centre and some Coca Cola cans littered around. A jumbled pile of red books, a red cable telephone, a crocheted scarf and a yellow bag set a scene of domestic disarray, but it’s clearly been carefully composed. The last item stands out in a room where red and white seem to predominate. I look down at my programme. Printed in block capitals is Cocteau’s advice for directors looking to take on his play: “The actress should give the impression that she is bleeding, losing her life’s blood, like a wounded beast”. The hints of red are already foreboding, and we’re only at the House Rules Announcement.
The play follows an unnamed woman (Grace Gordon), desperately trying to maintain a telephone conversation with her ex-partner (Celine Denis). The partner wants to make arrangements for picking up the love letters they once exchanged. She has moved on and is anxious to be rid of them. In this play, communication is impossible, represented by the line constantly cutting off. When they do get through to each other, the woman has one request concerning the love letters her partner intends to burn: to keep the ashes and send them to her in a cigarette box. Words between the two are, from the outset, interred objects. Most of the time the telephone call is strictly one-sided; we hear only the plangent responses of the woman to her ex-lover’s muted voice.
The conversation is repeatedly interrupted by strangers, who enter their connection through crossed lines. Voices impede their telephone call at the most awkward of moments and the conversation frequently becomes lost in a whirl of chatter. Grace Gordon performs the isolation of these moments with bruising anguish, striding neurotically across the stage at every blip. Indeed the whole set seems to collapse into her agitated frame of mind: Juliet Taub’s desperately searching spotlights combine chillingly with Ice Dob’s thumping sound effects.
Cherwell went behind the scenes to speak to director Eva Bailey. For Eva, La Voix Humaine lends itself to the act of translation. First performed in 1930 at the Comédie Française, it is a play in which the much caressed, battered, and kissed telephone is its own character. The comedic imposition of crossed lines, the random infringement of strangers’ voices, the occasional prurient eavesdropper, suggest that this conversation is far from an isolated affair. The translator, like this machine which both facilitates and mangles communication, may be equally guilty of such glitches in the line.
Eva installed this analogy of translation at the heart of the play. The voices on the other end of the line – be it that of the woman’s ex-partner or the voices which infiltrate and interrupt their conversation – are all embodied by an enigmatic but terrifying actor on the side of the stage: Celine Denis. She responds to the woman’s cries of despair in rapid French, speaking both to the alienated linguistic code between two ex-lovers and the play’s own separation from the original French script.
Full Moon Theatre is a production company deeply engaged with the question of defining language boundaries. From The Irresistible Rise of Arturo Ui to Madame La Mort, they have carved out a space for translated theatre in Oxford. Translated words and translated contexts both have a play to part in these reworked texts. Madame La Mort, for example, married 19th century French with 21st century English.
With a particular focus on how the translated text corresponds to the play’s own themes of communication barriers, Full Moon Theatre took an original and thrilling take. Despite a running time of little under an hour, I came out shaken by the raw intensity of the performance, in which the acting, set, sound, and lighting all came together to reach a rare, corruscating effect.
