La Voix Humaine. Photo: courtesy of Toneelgroep Amsterdam

Thurday, May 17 – Saturday, May 19
Byham Theater - Pittsburgh, PA

Performed in Dutch with English subtitles

Holland’s largest repertory company Toneelgroep Amsterdam renders an inspired and shattering vision of Jean Cocteau’s seminal text, La Voix Humaine. This story of abandonment, grief and heartbreak centers on a desperate woman’s last phone call to an ex-lover. Masterfully directed by Ivo Van Hove, La voix humaine has been described by The Village Voice as “a spare, raw, enormously affecting production, brought to incisive life by Halina Reijn.” The audiences’ most voyeuristic impulses are skillfully manipulated in this spellbinding tour-de-force production.

Ivo van Hove thinks there is more to the script than the anecdotal rift between two lovers. La voix humaine is an existential drama about loss and loneliness, and the painful realisation that often you hardly know your most intimate partner. The script reveals the pitfalls of expectation and projection that arise in relationships and the bitter truth that the veil of love is sometimes torn to shreds. It gradually dawns on the woman that she has devoted her entire life to her other half and that now, for the first time, she has only herself to fall back on. La voix humaine is a script about looming emptiness and a desire for inconsolability. The starting point for its staging was the human voice, and it investigates all sorts of ways of talking; from conversation about imaginary dialogue to monologue intérieur, from the hushed to the elated, and from muffled behind glass to dissipated in the noise of the city.