Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play is a monologue disguised as a series of breakup phone calls in which we hear the anguish of a woman being left by her partner. Using the telephone as a metaphor – the cut or crossed lines a mirror to the couple’s emotional disconnect – it is not just a dramatic experiment in voice but a painfully human play about being desperately, frantically, in love with someone as they coolly walk away. There have been vastly different versions of the central, tormented character, from Ingrid Bergman’s tremulous chain-smoker in 1960 to Tilda Swinton’s imperiously wounded woman in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2021 film. What is key is the grip of the emotional drama.
That drama is not captured here, nor its tension. The director Ivo van Hove also adapts Cocteau’s script and manages to divest it of its raw emotional power and momentum. It becomes as stripped and sterile as the empty glass box of a set, designed by Jan Versweyveld, which seems to keep us at arm’s length with its clinical inscrutability.
