The Human Voice

Jean Cocteau was many things: poet, playwright, artist, filmmaker, collaborator, and provocateur. His 1930 play La Voix humaine, set in pre-war Paris and set to music by Francis Poulenc in 1958, was a stroke of genius, diagnosing the modern ache of ‘depersonalised communication’. In it, we eavesdrop on a woman known simply as Elle, as she speaks on the telephone to a lover who has already left her. We hear only her side of the conversation as the telephone, promising intimacy, delivers its opposite: interruptions, crossed lines and silences, turning technology itself into an accomplice in emotional cruelty. Poulenc’s masterpiece is in the most expressive of hands with Claire Booth and Christopher Glynn, who have recently recorded the work having performed it together for over 20 years.