Bernstein - Trouble in Tahiti & Poulenc - La voix humaine (Buxton, 2025)

Trouble in Tahiti - Leonard Bernstein
La voix humaine - Francis Poulenc

Buxton Festival Opera, 2025

Iwan Davies, Daisy Evans, Charles Rice, Hanna Hipp, Chloé Hare-Jones, Harun Tekin, Ross Cumming, Allison Cook

Buxton Opera House, 23rd July 2025

There have been double bills of short operas at the Buxton Festival in the past that have adventurously even managed to connect two different works that appear to have very little in common. I reviewed The Maiden in the Tower & Kashchei the Immortal by Sibelius and Rimsky-Korsakov in 2012 and La Princesse Jaune and La Colombe by Saint-Saëns and Gounod in 2013, but I don't think there has been one since then. This double bill for the 2025 Buxton International Festival is a hard sell however; two works with a very bleak outlook on relationships which, for all their differences, are actually complementary on some level. It still takes a little creativity to link Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti with Poulenc's La voix humaine, but in the Buxton tradition Daisy Evans managed to do that quite successfully, even if that meant doubling up the misery.

As bleak as the outlook is in each of these works individually, their strength is that they are very good at what they do. What they do is present a miniature opera with a concentrated intensity that suits material that would probably be less effective (and unendurable) if they were drawn out any longer. Their very concision make them special, allowing a singular mood to be explored, offering a rare intensity that would feel out of place in a longer work (although Ambroise Thomas has a go at rivalling such emotions with his long soliloquies and a mad scene that lasted a whole Act in Hamlet at the Buxton Festival on the previous evening). Whether the two works gain or not from being connected - or whether they even should be brought together - is debatable, but as far as the Buxton production went it did intensify the works without overburdening their inherent simplicity.

Trouble in Tahiti is a challenge in itself, almost setting itself up to be deeply unlikeable in a way that is hard to define. Bernstein's treads a tricky line between parody and satire, between seducing the audience with catchy show tunes that celebrate the ideal of the typical suburban American married couple (of the 1950s) by setting it to sunny music, with a cheesy chorus, radio jingles and musical numbers while at the same time throwing in some dissonance that hints that there is a dark and corrupting side to the American dream that lies beneath the surface. The libretto throws out some cliched lines, undoubtedly sold by idealistic musicals like the film 'Trouble in Tahiti' that Dinah goes to see, but yet they also reveal truths about the circumstances of a married couple at a standstill in their relationship and about to grow more distant.

There is a lot to 'unpack' in the contrasts of the sunny music and the reality of the disintegration of a relationship, so what you probably don't need in a production of Trouble in Tahiti is anything that just makes it even more 'troubling'. Or maybe you do, because while the opera hints at Sam being a bit on the fresh side with his secretary - something he doesn't even consider as cheating, but just a part of conforming to the natural law of being a man - Daisy Evans' production went further to show evidence of Sam's philandering. She does this quite cleverly (and maliciously) by tying Bernstein's work into Poulenc's La voix humaine.

The presence of Allison Cook behind a lace curtain in a warmly lit room off to one side of stage was an early clue to what was to come in the second part of the double bill, the little box room practically an ideal of a typical set for Poulenc's La voix humaine, a room designed to feel perfectly claustrophobic for a woman waiting on a phone call from her lover, feeling trapped and caged with no way out of her predicament. What you might not have expected however was Sam to wander into the room while he is supposed to be out at the gym and start undressing the lady in the room. It's there that Sam goes to deliver his master of the universe soliloquy, boasting of his masculine superiority, winning another kind of 'trophy'. Is the lady of La voix humaine his secretary, Mrs Brown? She's going to be let down by the time we get to the second part of the double bill. Things really aren't going to get any more cheerful.

"That was the most depressing opera I've ever seen", a lady exclaimed at the interval in the bar of the upper circle at the Buxton Opera House. "Wait until you see the next one", I warned. I didn't of course spoil it for the lady by telling her that La voix humaine is about a woman unravelling at the breakup of a relationship who attempts - and maybe even succeeds - in committing suicide while on the phone to her ex-lover. Perhaps I should have said something, as I'm sure she went home traumatised after Allison Cook's performance as the lady left hanging on the telephone.

That indeed is the unfortunate premise and fate of the lady of Poulenc's (what is usually a) monodrama. The perspective of the double bill production changes accordingly however, the little box room off to the side of Trouble in Tahiti opening up to show a woman spilling sleeping tablets over the dresser and floor as she tries to reconnect a faulty telephone connection so that she can pour her heart out to a man who traditionally we don't actually see on the stage. It's usually the case that no other figures are seen and no other voices heard - or needed in this intense piece - but here the phone is picked up in the home of Sam and Dinah.

Given this insight into the other side of the phone line serves to take in the wider context of what we are witnessing. We see Sam making silent gestures, trying to be placatory and being somewhat insensitive to what he probably sees as emotional blackmail, while it's clear that it really amounts to a call for help to simply hear a sympathetic human voice. That isn't found either when Dinah, tired of these mysterious calls to her husband, picks up the phone and is devastated by what she hears. Not for the woman's sake, of course, but for her own marriage and for which she will probably forgive her husband in the end.

La voix humaine doesn't need this. It's debatable whether it helps in any way to visualise the person on the other end of the line, and take such a determined stand on what their nature might be. We already get hints of that from the one-sided conversation, so it doesn't need to be spelled out. There is something to be said for just letting us see the woman, 'Elle', and Allison Cook did not need any additional props or bodies (the chorus from Tahiti also make mournful appearances) to get across the state of mind of her character. But the touches and the connections were subtle and unobtrusive, and it seemed that rather than opening up the claustrophobic drama, it may indeed have made it feel even more traumatic.

There was perhaps a greater challenge for Iwan Davies and the Buxton Festival Orchestra to marry together the two completely different styles of music for the two short operas, but they presented both superbly. As with the outstanding Hamlet the previous evening, the key to really making all these pieces work is in the singing. Perhaps even more so here since there is a lot of intense solo singing, although Hamlet had that too. Charles Rice as Sam and Hanna Hipp as Dinah were both tremendous, engaging you in their own personal worlds and making you feel the depth of their troubles in their clashes. Allison Cook, much like her Gertrude the previous night, also had a rather extended physical meltdown in this production of La voix humaine as 'Elle', and carried you along, all too emotionally involved in the torment she was going through. 

Whoever was responsible for pairing these two operas together - I imagine it was the Festival Opera director Adrian Kelly - really challenged the audience and put you through the wringer. You weren't going to see many smiling faces when you left the opera house, but it would be hard not to be impressed with the unique qualities of these works, the performances and the creative artistry in making two short operas that never sound all that appealing in synopsis come fully alive and show deep insights into their human characters.

External links: Buxton International Festival

Poulenc - La Voix Humaine/ Purcell - Dido and Aeneas

Francis Poulenc - La Voix Humaine
Henry Purcell - Dido and Aeneas

Opera North, 2013

Wyn Davies, Aletta Collins, Lesley Garrett, Pamela Helen Stephen, Phillip Rhodes, Amy Freston, Gillene Herbert, Heather Shipp, Louise Mott, Jake Arditti, Nicholas Watts, Rebecca Moon

Grand Opera House, Belfast, 8 March 2013

Opera North's Winter 2103 touring programme wonderfully covers four centuries of music, with Mozart's Clemenza di Tito from the 18th century, Verdi's Otello from the 19th, Francis Poulenc's La Voix Humaine from the 20th century and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas from the 17th century.  It's the combination of the latter two operas on the same bill however that represent the widest dynamic in such a way that they hardly seem complementary at all.  In reality however - particularly with the source of Dido and Aeneas stretching back 1,000 years to its source in Virgil's 'Aeneid' - what they demonstrate is the universality and commonality of human emotions that still have resonance in the 21st century.

The common theme that relates the two works is of course one that opera has specialised in over the years - that of the woman seduced, betrayed and abandoned.  The two works given here however represent lesser-known examples of that theme and certainly approach it musically and dramatically in very different ways.  As different as they are however, they each present a unique take on the subject and stand as important, powerful pieces that demonstrate the power of expression of the operatic art form.

Composed by Francis Poulenc in 1959 to a libretto by Jean Cocteau based on his own 1930 dramatic monologue, the one-act opera La Voix Humaine is unusual opera work in that it is written to be performed and sung by a single person, and sung moreover as a one-sided conversation that takes place on the telephone.  The unnamed woman ('Elle') is alone in her room, waiting anxiously for a phone-call from her ex-lover.  The conversation, occasionally interrupted by the unreliable service and a party-line, reveals that the man who had been her lover for five years is now about to be married to another woman and 'Elle' has been contemplating suicide.

There's an interesting ambiguity and modernity in the fact that the woman's desire for the warmth of love in the comforting sound of the human voice (la voix humaine) is brought to her electronically through a telephone line, but Poulenc and Cocteau's little drama abounds in such contradictions and ambiguities.  Is it a monologue or really a one-sided dialogue?  A dialogue would imply that the conversation is two-way, but it's clear that there is only one person who hopes to gain or express anything through the conversation.  In many respects, the woman is speaking to herself, grasping at the meagre lifeline that is being held out, but only for as long as the call lasts, trying to fool herself that all is not lost.  When that is gone all she is left with is that terrifying figure she sees reflected in the mirror before her.

Opera North's production, directed by Aletta Collins, played further on the ambiguities within the work with some clever visual references to that hateful mirror.  It not only reflects the truth about her lie that she is glamorously dressed after an evening dinner date, revealing instead a tired, graying woman on the edge of breakdown contemplating a bottle of pills on the dresser, but she can also see reflected in it all the horrors of her imagination, seeing her ex-lover enjoying parties and affairs with other women.  It's as vivid a visual representation of the harsh reality of the woman's situation and her mindset as it is possible to imagine.

With Lesley Garrett singing the role of 'Elle', it's also about as effective and expressive a performance of the woman's situation as you can imagine.  Poulenc's composition of the music and the singing part reflects the cadences of the spoken voice in a similar way to how Janáček would write, with rhythms and pauses, the rising and falling of tones and inflections, but evidently that's particularly relevant to a work that is called La Voix Humaine.  As a singer whose spoken voice alone is most musical, Lesley Garrett is the ideal kind of singer for this kind of piece, even if it is far from the more popular style of singing that she is famous for.  Her every gesture and inflection - singing the work in English - was perfectly judged in a way that made her character's circumstances compelling to watch and her inevitable fate as touching as it was chilling.

Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (c. 1689) is one of the earliest versions of a subject that Francesco Cavalli first covered in his opera La Didone (1641), but which became something of a standard in the Baroque opera repertoire with at least 50 works adapted to Pietro Metastasio's libretto (Didone Abbandonata) in the 18th century (including Hasse, Galuppi, Porpora, Vinci and Piccinni).  It might not have been the model that Poulenc's La Voix Humaine draws from, but the essential characteristic of a woman left to face her demons alone is just as vividly depicted in the fate of Dido when her lover Aeneas, who has "stopped over" in Carthage with the fleeing Trojans and then abandoned her to fulfil the destiny that the gods have in store for him in Italy.

Although it is fully scored - innovatively without recitative at this stage in the development of opera - and has a larger cast than Poulenc's mono-opera, the strength of this version of the Dido and Aeneas story (unlike Berlioz's Les Troyens, to take the most extreme example) is that it similarly focusses all its musical and dramatic elements on the predicament of the lone figure of a woman abandoned.  Dido's confidante Belinda tries to warn her and turn her away from her dark thoughts and Aeneas even appears and attempts to put his case to her, but the opera remains firmly viewed from the perspective of a woman who has suddenly become aware that her youth and happiness are slipping away.  

Like the reflections in the mirror of La Voix Humaine, Dido's thoughts, fears and nightmares are vividly real, given human form in witches and visions of herself - as a younger woman? - that follow her, mimic her, torment her and drive her to her doom.  This element is beautifully expressed in Aletta Collins' direction and Giles Cadle's set design of the darkened bedroom of long shadows, with spectres in the form of dancers that slip out from under and behind the bed, hovering in the background and persistently at the edge of Dido's vision until they overwhelm her.

Just as effective is the rhythmic drive of Purcell's score as performed by the Orchestra of the Opera North under conductor Wyn Davies, switching over to Baroque period instruments after the interval.  Although Dido threatened to become swamped by the figures and doppelgangers of her nightmares, there was no danger of Pamela Helen Stephen losing her grip on her character.  Purcell's Dido is as strongly defined as any of the many different depictions of this character in other works.  It may be short, around an hour long, but the focus on Dido and her reaction to her predicament is deep and intense.  Stephen gave that full expression in her singing, never more so than in those final moments of Dido's rejection of Aeneas' weak justifications.

Like the other two productions in this Opera North Winter 2013 touring programme, there was a wonderful completeness and attention to detail in the concept and the execution for both these short works.  From the casting of the roles, the direction of the performances, the staging, the costumes and the musical delivery, great care has evidently been put into making sure that everything comes together as a whole to express these works in the best possible light, and that was all the more evident in the complementary approach taken towards works as diverse as La Voix Humaine and Dido and Aeneas, separated by almost 300 years, but shown here still to be vital and relevant in the 21st century.