The Human Voice

The plot of The Human Voice holds in one sentence: a woman speaks on the telephone with a loved one who is leaving her. In this one-act play, everything is played out there, as close as possible to her romantic distress, her trampled desire, and her will to believe in it despite everything. One hears only the voice of this woman, never that of the person on the other end of the line. Caught in a whirlwind of emotions and contradictory feelings – dependency, anger, hope, lucidity – the voice hesitates, lies, corrects itself, then reveals itself, in a final fight against loss and abandonment. Written by Jean Cocteau in 1930, the play caused a scandal: that a woman expresses her passion and her despair without restraint disturbed the morals of the time. Salvatore Calcagno reconvenes this iconic text, after having staged it ten years ago with the actress Sophia Leboutte. During this recreation, it is the actress, cabaret performer, and photographic icon Mina Serrano who, accompanied by a string ensemble, will embody a sensitive and resolutely contemporary reading of it. And what if taking the risk of loving was, today more than ever, an act of resistance? Entre Ancora tu, programmed at the Varia two seasons ago, and The Human Voice, surface the reminiscences of romantic mourning and the staging of absence. After a breakup, what does one show of oneself? What does one invent to convince oneself that the story is not over, that the other still loves us? With infinite finesse, Salvatore Calcagno explores the dramatic springs of human relationships and reminds us, through a performance where the intimate embraces the universal, that beauty also resides in our vulnerabilities.