Only after the impression was already got, I have researched the full information about the play’s author and the text itself. The impression which was the pure thrill of seen and heard and the aftertaste of the compassion, the regret about the past and the proud of today’s myself.
It turned out, that this play is barely less than 100 years old and written by french dramatist Jean Cocteau. The new problem’s vision of the play was introduced by the actress in white dress on the stage with minimalistic decorations.
Jean Cocteau wrote one-act plays-monologues for such performers as Édith Piaf, Berthe Bovy, Jean Marais. The author said that this kind of performance showed new sides of artists’ talents as well as it brought to light «the piece of real life», and psychologism.
In the dark room the Woman paints «YOU» on the wall, and even before the first monologue is started she quickly adds two dots in the end, trying to get the incompleteness this way. But it’s vain hope. It’s over. He left and He will never come back. This is how the director of the play sees the most frequent woman’s fear coming true - the woman’s hell, which she creates herself and which she cannot escape then.
In the original Cocteau’s play the telephone actually rings, although we hear only heroine’s part of the dialogue, but we can figure out the second part anyway.
But we, the people of the 21st century, have enough tragedies in real life, so the original version of the play will not impress us that much.
Meanwhile, in the new version the feeling of loss is intentionally intensified. It is brought to the point of total loss (what Cocteau doesn't have in his play) - when there is no more this Person in the world, but He is still alive in the loving woman’s conscious. There, in her mind, she goes through everything again and again. Through everything: what she said and what she didn’t, what she regrets about.
To reach even those, who are insensible to such kind of tragedy, there should be the «inhuman thrill». And they have it in this play. Here, it eventually strikes even the least empathic spectators.
The fragility, tenderness of the woman’s devotion even starts to seem to be a dog-like one at some moment. You even start to feel the contempt for this, as well as the suspicion that the Woman uses drugs or something. But Ella Nepomniashchaia continues to deepen into the ocean of suffering, in fact dragging a spectator with her.
From hysteria to the full exhaustion, from mental audition to heteroptics, together with the heroine the spectator comes to the eventual horrifying feeling - «to stop speaking and to sink into the emptiness and darkness».
The important point is that the heroine fights with the suffering. And you see her pain through the prism of this fight.
Ella Nepomniashchaia not only screams, whispers, laughs, cries and begs. Her body «speaks» for her in all its plasticity - from agonising crossing of hands and legs to the ballet elements, running round in circle and doing the splits. The body and the voice, speaking with the white phone, hypnotise.
And you can’t stop watching, and you can’t go on watching as well, because what comes after the shock from the seen is the realization.
In the end of the performance the heroine creates her own world, where they are still together, where everything is good. This is the only way to live on.
This way in the performance «The Voice» the «inhuman thrill» enables the seld-realization, what is the fundamental purpose of the art.
The author: Nataly Bulgakova
The In human Thrill
Review about "The VOICE"
(English)