Heartbreak and farce collide in Glyndebourne’s final production of the season, a double bill of Poulenc’s two one-acters – La Voix Humaine and Les Mamelles de Tirésias – directed by Laurent Pelly and conducted by Robin Ticciati. Both, in their very different ways, examine themes of sexuality and desire.
The “tragédie lyrique” La Voix Humaine (1959) depicts a desperate phone conversation between a possibly suicidal woman, simply called Elle (“She”), and the unseen, unheard lover who is dumping her for someone else. Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947) is its polar opposite: a glorious if at times surreally bonkers comedy, way ahead of its time in its treatment of gender stereotyping and gender reversal, in which feminist Thérèse suddenly becomes a man and heads out into male-dominated society, leaving her bewildered husband at home to make babies (40,049 of them, we are told) on his own, through “willpower”.
