The Call & The Human Voice | Opera Queensland
Images: Visual Poets Society
One of my favourite kind of stories is the ones that catch characters in a single moment, often one that changes them forever. The kind that delve so completely into a single event that you think about the events either side of it for days on end. Both The Call and The Human Voice purported to be such stories. Both delivered in terms of the level of depth reached but one left me with questions that had little to do with the narrative lead up and aftermath.
The Human Voice is performed first and presented the audience with a more traditional opera experience. There is a woman in a very fancy dress, sitting at a very fancy dinner table, and she sings very fancily. This is not to minimise the quality of the costume or set design nor that of Alexandra Flood’s performance as Elle; all three are splendid. I enter the Concert Hall and Elle is waiting for us onstage. She sits at a fully set dinner table and stares blankly, longingly, harrowingly at her phone.
After a fifteen-minute delay the Queensland Symphony Orchestra led by Zoe Zeniodi begins to play and Flood begins to sing. Again, she is truly splendid and so too is the orchestra. With the music acting as the voice of Elle’s unnamed soon-to-be-ex-lover we watch her grappling with him and herself in what the audience comes to understand is the final phone call of their relationship.
Images: Visual Poets Society
Me and anyone I’ve ever met who’s attracted to men have experienced this woe firsthand. The mental gymnastics of figuring out what a boy’s texts mean, if he’s going to call us, whether we are wasting our time trying to date him, if we’re crazy for feeling the need to solve these puzzles at all. The Human Voice puts that emotional experience on steroids in classic opera fashion. Elle’s yellow socks the perfect touch of comfort and humanity amongst the epic almost mythic nature of the drama. The composition, the performer, and the lighting all work in tandem in curate a sense of delusion and madness from the offset of the piece that crescendos until we reach Elle’s breaking point, the same point at which the opera ends. All-in-all an entertaining and harrowing examination of the consuming nature of love and a warning against loving someone so completely you lose yourself.
The Call was performed in English and so I have more to say from a craft perspective. This is because I was not actively trying to put flat English text together with the emoting being done by Flood in french; a language I do not understand. In all honesty, this is probably to the work’s disadvantage as while I had an intense emotional experience with it I feel it could be improved in ways that would deepen the experience even further. These improvements have exclusively to do with Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall’s libretto (the lyrics for those who weren’t aware). Every other aspect of the work is to be commended. Ali McGregor’s performance is witty, and haunting, and raw. Conner D’Netto’s composition makes interesting and affective use of contemporary instruments. The technical aspects of the work, which include the use of the live feeds, allow the audience to feel close to McGregor’s unnamed character and give the work an almost cinematic quality.
Images: Visual Poets Society
Unfortunately, none of this makes up for the fact the libretto was unable to match the ambitiousness of the rest of the work, however. The line writing makes attempts at poetry but the images are either cliché or let go of too early and so the viewer doesn’t have enough time to really digest them. The plot writing cannot decide what it is this opera is about. It begins and I believe I am about to watch a scathing class critique. I believe that I will able to write in this review about the irony of spending almost $100 to see an opera about how inaccessible opera is to working class audiences.
But by the work’s end it feels almost as if the moral of the story is that radicalism is bad and the bourgeoisie should stay in their lane. My plus one (who is much more knowledgeable about the goings on of the opera scene than I) also remarked that if The Call had committed to it more fully it could have joined the contingent of works experimenting with the emerging genre of Verbatim Opera.
A lot of these issues could be attributed to the fact this work is adapted from a story told by real person on a storytelling podcast. Actually attributing them to that is the lazy move in my opinion. Adaptation can, famously, be a very effective way to imbue existing work with new meaning or to enhance it in some way. I do not believe that happens here because the original work is not well integrated enough into the conventions of its new home. One could counter by saying this work is subversive but subversion of operatic convention and messy adapting are two very different things.
Images: Visual Poets Society
The Call and The Human Voice presents two deeply emotional, well connected stories about women who lose themselves and meet very different ends through the power of a single phone call. The latter a classic that is given a new life and a new weight in the age of social media and the other an ambitious new Australian work that while a lovely experience could have used a dramaturg on its creative team to make it a lovelier work of art as well.
