La Voix humaine and L’Heure espagnol opera reviews – an irresistible and scatty double bill
It’s that moment when the guilty hand can no longer be kept from the opera chocolate box. Under lockdown the moral imperative has been to head to the health-grain cupboard of Wagner, down Janacek purgatives, or cleanse the mind of distracting trivia with dissonant Schoenberg. All intellectually commendable.
But hasn’t Boris said we are free? Well, free-ish. Even Nurse Nicola Sturgeon – she’s the one wielding the daily-briefing enema – is allowing folk back into pubs. Opera Zuid, the Maastricht based opera company that “has the nostalgia of a travelling circus but combines this with a contemporary sense of passion,” has produced an irresistible, scatty double bill La Voix humaine (Poulenc) and L’Heure espagnole (Ravel). The Poulenc is a Bendicks Bittermint; the Ravel a Charbonnier fondant.
Both can be plucked surreptitiously from the OperaVision box here.
Recommendation; gorge on both at one sitting. Each is timed at about an hour. They may last only a bit longer than a European Football Super League. But, they leave a better taste in the mouth. Opera Zuid seeks the widest possible audience, “opera by and for everyone”.
Without the highest production values and needle-sharp attention to pure theatre such a claim might be written off simply as trite, press release vacu-blurb. In the hands of director French-German Béatrice Lachaussée these contrasting French works are given wide appeal, using a buffa strategy to illuminate la condition humaine. They are fun to watch, but it’s fun with a purpose.
Francis Poulenc (1899 -1963), completed La Voix humaine in 1958. He collaborated with long-term copain, Jean Cocteau, the French poet, dramatist, novelist, film-maker, art critic and everything else under France’s blazing artistic sun. The Cocteau play of the same name debuted in 1928. Fortunately, the libretto is shorn of otiose Cocteau philosophy and lasers in on the practical post-affair dilemma of the generically named “Elle”. It makes for sharper action. No hand wringing soliloquies.
Elle has been dumped by her lover. She is generic “elle”, every dumpee, alone in the former trysting apartment, waiting for a phone call from a weasel ex-lover. They have only recently broken off their relationship.
In 1958, phones were Bakelite beauties but are sharply updated here to the ubiquitous mobile. Several mistaken calls, upgraded to those pesky, plaguing nuisance calls – “Madame, I am calling about your recent accident” – are received, dispatched, and finally weasel rings through. Elle recounts to him the events of her past evening and day, but she clearly conceals the emotional truth, feigning a calm and collected veneer.
The theatrical trick is the one-sided conversation. The audience is being asked to stand in for the weasel. It is an effective artifice of engagement. As Elle makes arrangements to hand over a satchel of photographs and personal correspondence spanning the five-year relationship there is a whiff of potential blackmail, should weasel hang up. He is on a hook. Elle has the incriminating letters and is not afraid to use them.
Ostensibly they speak about their past happiness, and Elle’s acceptance of his other relationships, but it’s clear she is faking it. Their conversation is riddled with interruptions and dropped connections. Where is weasel? When she calls his home, a butler answers and she discovers he is not there. This confirms her suspicions that he has moved in with his new lover. Even worse, he may be in a restaurant.
When he calls yet again and reaches her, she keeps up the pretence of being fine, until despair and desperation overcome her and she confesses that she attempted suicide the night before, saved only by her friend, Marthe, and a stomach pumping doctor.
The rest of the call continues with interruptions and bit by bit she pieces together the growing realisation that her lover has moved on and left her behind to deal with her emotional loss. Her anguish and resignation build until, in a final gesture, she says goodbye and expresses her love for him one last time. She is tragically bent on a second suicide attempt, this time likely to be successful.
Everyone Covid-cooped in an apartment will sympathise with Elle. The set is modernist. The strewn packing cases imply that Elle, now loverless, is about to be made homeless as well. Weasel has given up the lease. Talar Dekrmanjian, the Syrian-American soprano, who plays Elle puts on a bravura solo performance. Her rapid mood swings from despair to false hope are compelling. She has been banged up here for too long and is becoming desperate. We are on her side.
The mood is darkened by two macabre touches. When she discusses the welfare of their pet dog, she claims Fido has taken against her because it blames her for its master, weasel’s, disappearance. A silhouette of the psychologically challenged animal appears on a transparent wall. She dismissively describes the dog’s lack of movement and failure to eat as petulant grumping. That Fido has been allowed to starve to death, confined in the hall, is the grisly implication. The audience sees it. Elle is in denial. She is losing the plot.
In earlier productions, when her status as dumpee becomes undeniable, Elle would wind the braided telephone cord around her neck. Conclusion? She is going to hang herself. Opera Zuid brings tele-tech up to date by having Elle attach a set of earphones to her mobile, then wrap that cord around her neck instead.
Slight incredulity, as earphone cords are thin. Not got the hanging potential of a sturdy braid. Good job she doesn’t do Bluetooth. So, instead, Mlle Lauchaussée has her open the balcony window, making it pretty obvious that once the lights have died, she will jump. This time Marthe is missing. Is Marthe a figment of Elle’s imagination? No saving Elle now.
Poulenc, a master of theatrical music, matches his score to every mood twist. His only other often performed opera, Dialogues des Carmélites, post-dated his adoption of serious religious themes following the death of his friend and composer, Pierre Octave Ferroud. He was decapitated in a car crash in 1936. After, Poulenc had a religious experience when he visited the rock-vaulting shrine of Notre Dame de Rocamadur. He rediscovered his Catholic faith. His wonderful opus of religious music streams from that tragedy.
Now for the Ravel fondant. L’Heure espagnole is a comic gem. Not least because it is a cynical Frenchman’s view of testosterone driven Toledo. Bulls, beaus and the discipline of the clock. This turns out to be a production where time and timing are truly of the essence.
Clockmaker Torquemada – was the Inquisition really headed by clockmakers? Joke no.1 – is at work in his shop when Ramiro comes by on his bike to get his watch repaired. As originally set in 1907 Ramiro is a muleteer. He needs an accurate watch to keep his mules on time. Here he is updated to muleteer, version 2.0, an orange-anoraked DHL man.
It’s Thursday, the day Torquemada checks the city clocks. David Cameron, sorry, that would be local influencer Don Iñigo, has secured him a cushy public sector contract to keep the watchmaker out of the way on Thursdays. Ramiro is told to wait until he returns. Ramiro is unaware that Torquemada’s wife, Concepción, always receives her lovers during her husband’s absence. In an attempt to get rid of Ramiro, she asks him to move a grandfather clock into her bedroom.
Her first lover, the poet and student Gonzalve, arrives. He is a feckless plonker, inspired to make poetry not love. When Ramiro returns from the bedroom, she sends him upstairs again, with an excuse of having chosen the wrong clock, and hides Gonzalve in a second clock. Ramiro, unlike any DHL courier on the planet, obliges, brings back the first clock, then carts her lover upstairs unseen.
Don Iñigo, the local sleazebag banker, manipulator of public contracts and second Concepción picador, arrives and also hides in a clock. Good job Torquemada runs a thriving business. When Ramiro returns with the first clock, Concepción asks him to carry the clock with Gonzalve upstairs and accompanies him.
Ramiro returns and is completely at a loss to explain the behaviour of women. As Concepción juggles the trysts with her two lovers, she creates a myriad of excuses and fabrications to make use of Ramiro’s brute strength, and he in turn obliges by carrying her hidden lovers up and down. Concepción is becoming impressed by the ease with which Ramiro carries the ‘heavy’ clocks upstairs. Pectorals are admired. Easy to guess what happens next.
Torquemada returns from his municipal duties. He discovers Gonzalve and Don Iñigo in their respective clocks and asks in amazement what they are doing. They claim to be inspecting the timepieces. The not so daft Torquemada sells them the clocks.
Concepción is now without any clock, but she chooses instead to wait for Ramiro to reappear, when the pectorals win. He and Concepción disappear behind the sofa. Finally, all sing the moral of the story: there is always an opportunity for love to thrive, especially when there is a Ramiro.
It is nothing more than consequential than a Brian Rix Whitehall bedroom farce of the 1960s, but with cunning tweaks. Huge entertainment. The dialogue is pin sharp. Double-entendres chime more frequently than the clocks. Every cast member delivers a perfect comic turn. Gilles Ragon, the French tenor, plays a wonderfully philosophical Torquemada. He’s up to Concepción’s tricks and instead of being a naive cuckold turns her lovers’ desire to his profit.
Romie Estèves, a pouting French mezzo-soprano, brings the house down. Her growing disillusionment with the babbling Gonzalve as he calls on Siri to take down his random thoughts for future plays, poems and novels marches in lockstep with her growing interest in bulging DHL pectorals. Baritone Michael Wilmering, who graduated summa cum laude from the Conservatory of Utrecht, morphs seamlessly from naif muleteer to conqueror of Concepción.
Alexandre Diakoff, the Swiss baritone, is a shoo-in for the role of Rex Greensill in my upcoming production of Greensill Capital – a comic Opera. I’m thinking of getting George Osborne to write the libretto. The plot’s quite simple. Greensill says he will pay people who are owed money, but keep some of it himself. As he claims he can do this quickly everyone says, “what a good idea”, then later, “that was a bad idea”.
David Cameron, who has time on his hands since running the country, makes a phone call to someone he used to know saying it’s a good idea. So, his fault. Bound to be a hit. Anyway, back in Ravel-land Alexandre Daikoff sings and acts his role brilliantly.
Dutch tenor, Peter Gijsbertsen, is the bravo turn. He takes the laurels for his portrayal of a complete prancing twit – absorbed by confiding each passing response from his lover’s advances to Siri, instead of focusing on the gorgeous Concepción. He is iOS, she is Android. The twain shall never meet.
Opera Zuid may be niche players, but those niches are important for the future of opera. La Vie humaine and L’Heure espagnole deserve revival and have been made accessible and up to date without compromising their originality. The company currently has other rare-flavoured delights in its repertoire – Jederman, Frank Martin; Le Cabaret du Faune, Claude Debussy; Goud! – Leonard Evars, amongst them. Pass that chocolate box. Time to pig out!