Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play is a monologue disguised as a sequence of breakup telephone calls by which we hear the anguish of a lady being left by her accomplice. Utilizing the phone as a metaphor – the minimize or crossed strains a mirror to the couple’s emotional disconnect – it isn't only a dramatic experiment in voice however a painfully human play about being desperately, frantically, in love with somebody as they coolly stroll away. There have been vastly completely different variations of the central, tormented character, from Ingrid Bergman’s tremulous chain-smoker in 1960 to Tilda Swinton’s imperiously wounded lady in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 movie. What's secret's the grip of the emotional drama.
That drama is just not captured right here, nor its stress. The director Ivo van Hove additionally adapts Cocteau’s script and manages to divest it of its uncooked emotional energy and momentum. It turns into as stripped and sterile because the empty glass field of a set, designed by Jan Versweyveld, which appears to maintain us at arm’s size with its scientific inscrutability.
Ruth Wilson, as a spurned lover wearing tracksuit bottoms and a Tweety Pie high, variously underplays and over-eggs her character’s struggling. There are cringing moments of overt theatricality when she imitates the couple’s canine, hugs her lover’s footwear and mimes frenzy, typically with added dance strikes, in musical interludes that includes Beyoncé and Radiohead. There's one painfully passive second when she is pinned to the wall, her again to us, whereas we take heed to Radiohead’s Find out how to Disappear Fully, from starting to finish, which not solely brings tedium but additionally offers the dehumanised impression of a lifeless insect caught on fly-paper.
Wilson appears to skirt over strains that symbolize her character’s powerlessness (she feels responsible and refuses guilty her accomplice for the damage he has brought on her). These segments, nevertheless tough for a contemporary viewers, are nakedly sincere and brave of their vulnerability however don't sound or really feel so right here. Maybe Wilson is attempting to infuse power into the half nevertheless it finally ends up sounding synthetic and distancing. As she unravels, there are hints of psychosis – is her lover merely a voice in her head? – however this attention-grabbing improvement is just not sustained.
Cocteau mentioned he wrote this play after his secure of feminine actors complained that their components had been too writer-director dominated. Mockingly, this appears to be simply the issue with this stylised manufacturing; Wilson’s character is a part of a grander directorial imaginative and prescient.
The glass casing, which seems to be a view into Wilson’s house from her balcony, might need created a voyeuristic intimacy, as was the case in a smaller, far simpler manufacturing at London’s Gate theatre, starring Leanne Greatest, in 2018. However Wilson solely ever seems like an exhibit encased in glass, dramatising feminine ache moderately than inhabiting it.
A script historically staged as telephone calls right here morphs right into a dramatic monologue, which is an modern transfer however the play interrupts its personal reconceptualisation by returning to the dramatic gadget of the telephone name in the direction of the tip.
Most troublingly, there's a whiff of the outdated cliche round ladies’s suicidal heartbreak which dooms this character to an Anna Karenina fatalism. Right here, although, we see this depressed, despairing lady placing on her heels and a killer gown in a single suicidal second – trying not not like a mannequin from an costly fragrance advert – which verges on misogynistic fantasy. And for all its theatricality, the play stays stolidly sedate; a 65-minute monologue that creeps to its finish.
On the Harold Pinter theatre, London, till 9 April
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