"La Voix Humaine" Burton Taylor Studio

Vox Humana is the name given to the key on an organ that is designed to simulate the human voice. This play is like that key: a plaintive, mournful tone that is at once convincingly human and self-consciously artistic. It's a vulnerable, lyrical song of despair that catches the rhythms of real speech.

Jean Cocteau's 1930 'monodrama' was created as a one-woman piece: a phone conversation with an unseen, unheard ex-lover who is about to get married to someone else. But in Eva Bailey's finely judged production it spreads beyond that solo voice, with a second actress adding echoes in French. As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that this second, ghostly figure is none other than the lover herself, and rather than being a wilful betrayal, the impending wedding is an act of patriarchal entrapment.

Updating La Voix Humaine to be about a single-sex relationship is not just a modern twist for 21st-century sexuality. In the original, the lover on the phone is freighted with overtones of abuse and exploitation. The woman we see is a victim, no more. In this rendition, the presence and unambiguous empathy of the lover make it a valedictory and shared experience, not just an abandoned one. As a result, Cocteau's play gains not just new perspective, but new depth.

The woman, played with both passion and control by Grace Gordon, moves between tearful pleading, nostalgic affection, towering anger and pathetic deception. She's like Jeanne Dielman with words. And Bailey's theatrical innovations match every change in tone with unobtrusive originality. Lighting switches between an expressionist red glow and a lonely, isolated spot in time with the woman's mood shifts. Sounds that could be half music and half distorted dial tone billow across the stage and her mind. And, in a drip-feed of tears timed to perfection, her mascara takes the entire one-hour runtime of the play to run from eye to chin.

One point of historical interest is the sheer number of times the phone call gets cut off. The French telecommunications system in the 1930s must have been appalling. (It's almost as bad as using a mobile phone in central Oxford today.) But those panicked scenes where the woman howls into the ether, again and again, 'Hello? Can you hear me?' gradually acquire existential meaning. Like the opening lyrics of Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb' ('Hello. Is there anybody in there?') the question is not just about audibility but whether we have any significance as human beings. And that leap in concept, vital to our understanding of the play, is delivered via a measured, almost restrained, mastery of theatrical technique.

La Voix Humaine treads a fine line between histrionics and genuine tragedy, and in the wrong hands it could be an unrelenting, one-sided rant. In his production notes, Cocteau demanded, 'The actress should give the impression that she is bleeding, losing her life's blood, like a wounded beast'. It's fair to say that, in this luminous production, that impression is achieved. It's Beauty and the wounded Beast.