TEHRAN-The play The Human Voice by Jean Cocteau is on stage at Simorgh Theater in Tehran.Araz Jahanshahi is the director of the play.
Masoumeh Asgarpur is the only actor in the performance, IRNA reported.The Human Voice is a monodrama first staged at the Comdie-Franaise in 1930, written two years earlier.
It is set in Paris, where a still-quite-young woman is on the phone with her lover of the last five years.
He is to marry another woman the next day, which causes her to despair.
The monologue triggers the woman's crippling depression.Cocteau's experiments with the human voice peaked with this play.
The story involves one woman on stage speaking on the telephone with her (invisible and inaudible) departing lover.
The telephone proved to be the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, feelings, and algebra concerning human needs and realities in communication.Cocteau acknowledged in the introduction to the script that the play was motivated, in part, by complaints from his actresses that his works were too writer/director-dominated and gave the players little opportunity to show off their full range of talents.The Human Voice is deceptively simple a woman alone on stage for almost one hour of non-stop theater speaking on the telephone with her departing lover.Reviews varied at the time and since but whatever the critique, the play represents Cocteau's state of mind and feelings towards his actors at the time: on the one hand, he wanted to spoil and please them; on the other, he was fed up with their diva antics and was ready for revenge.It is also true that none of Cocteau's works has inspired as much imitation: Francis Poulenc's opera La voix humaine, Gian Carlo Menotti's opera buffa The Telephone, and Roberto Rossellini's film version in Italian with Anna Magnani L'Amore (1948).
Pedro Almodvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) is also inspired by Cocteau's play.
There has also been a long line of interpreters, including Simone Signoret, Ingrid Bergman, and Liv Ullmann (in the play) and Julia Migenes, Denise Duval, Renata Scotto, Anja Silja, and Felicity Lott (in the opera).Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist, and critic.
He was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th century and hugely influential on the surrealist and Dadaist movements, among others.Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and Ren Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the algebra of verbal codes old and new, mise en scne language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde.His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theaters, the Boulevards, and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create.
His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.The proceeds from the sales of the The Human Voice will be donated to widowed and unsupported women on March 8, coinciding with the International Women's Day.SS/