The Human Voice
Harold Pinter Theatre | ★★✩✩✩

Someone should write a book about the art of the telephone conversation. Not the art of being part of one, but depicting one. It might include the call in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in which Ray Milland listens to the horrifying struggle of his wife, played by Grace Kelly, whom someone is attempting to murder at his behest.

But it is the funny phone calls I turn to most often; the sketch featuring a Long Island Jewish mother who listens to a litany of domestic woes from her daughter, each one of which the mother promises to solve as soon as she comes over. Then they realise one of them has called the wrong number and they have never met. “Does that mean you’re not coming?” asks the daughter.

And finally, I give you Bob Newhart, whose canon of one-sided telephone conversations includes him speaking to such co-conversationalists as Sir Walter Raleigh who has just discovered something called tobacco. “You do what, Walt? You roll it up, stick it in your mouth and set fire to it?” Another Newhart portrays a sheriff whose panicky deputy calls to report that he has found a shell on the beach. “What’s so remarkable about that, Jerry? Oh, it’s not that kind of shell.”

But forget the laughs. Each of the above generates more drama in its five minutes or so than Jean Cocteau’s experimental telephone play manages in 70 uninterrupted minutes. In form, it is closest to the Bob Newhart school, as there is only one voice. In this case, it belongs to Ruth Wilson’s unnamed woman. As we learn from her side of the dialogue and her bereft demeanour, she has been left by the man she is talking to.

First seen in 1930 in Paris, Cocteau was interested in how technology affected relationships. What was a novel form of communication then is now prosaic. Yet the work regularly attracts stars and famous directors. Recent film versions featured Rosamund Pike in 2018; two years later, Tilda Swinton made a short film directed by Pedro Almodóvar in which the Spanish auteur injected a surreal quality by revealing the apartment in which all the action — or inaction — takes place to be a film set.

Here, visionary director Ivo van Hove and his designer Jan Versweyveld strip everything away except the raw emotion created by Wilson’s lover. Like voyeurs, we watch her through a pillar box-shaped window suspended among the pitch darkness of the stage.

For him, the reason for the conversation is mainly pragmatic. Shoes and other belongings have to be collected. There is the matter of the unseen (unfortunately) dog, who is in mourning since his master left. Wearing a Tweetie Pie sweatshirt – the kind of clothing that could only be worn indoors — Wilson’s lovelorn woman affects insouciance about her newfound solitude. At least she tries, vocally. But visually we appreciate the disparity between how she sounds and how she is.

Oddly, Van Hove’s adaptation updates this solo play so that there is modern technology on view. A remote control adjusts music volume; Wilson’s character speaks, pleads and cries into a cordless phone. Yet the script still contains a line about the phone cord being wrapped around her neck. Also retained are the crossed lines, which hasn’t been a phone thing since the days Tim, the speaking clock, told us the time.

As a directorial and acting challenge, you can see the attraction. But not as a member of the audience. This is monotony as much as monologue. Oh for Jerry and his shell.