Trouble in Tahiti & La Voix Humaine
- Robert Beale
- Jul 24
- 2 min read
Bernstein (Trouble in Tahiti) and Poulenc, after Cocteau (La Voix Humaine)
Buxton International Festival
Buxton Opera House
July 15-25, 2025: 2 hrs 5 mins
Both these one-act operas have a regular place in the modern repertoire: the former about an American middle-aged couple whose marriage is on the rocks; the latter a one-voice show in which the woman (“Elle”) speaks on the telephone, on the verge of committing suicide the day after being dumped by her lover.
Each has been paired with various works in double-bill (recently Trouble in Tahiti was seen alongside A Quiet Place, a sequel Bernstein wrote that uses some of it in flashback), but I haven’t previously seen them joined as here, in Daisy Evans’ production for Buxton International Festival.
It works brilliantly well. Both are from the 1950s, but otherwise there’s no obvious parallel. In Daisy Evans’ vision, the woman with whom Sam (the husband) is having an affair in the former is seen with him in her bedroom through a side-stage window; in the latter we see her place from inside, as she becomes the protagonist of La Voix Humaine, Sam appearing both in her dreams and also through the window as the ex-lover (his wife also engaging in the repeated phone calls) in their sadly loveless matrimonial home.
Designer Loren Elstein has deftly created a set that retains its shape but reverses its content, so the two locations of the first opera are exactly reversed (and seen from different angles) to become those of the second.
The other outstanding quality of this double bill is musical. Allison Cook (also in the festival's production of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet), who sings Elle, is an extraordinary singer, one of a rare breed known as a soprano Falcon, with dramatic power over a very wide range from coloratura at the top to a passionate chest voice. I’ve seen some very good singing actresses in this role before, but she outshines them.
In Trouble in Tahiti there are five voices, with the loveless couple portrayed by Charles Rice as Sam and Hanna Hipp as Dinah, each redoubtable performers, and a close-harmony trio – a feature Bernstein incorporated to pastiche the once-popular style of scat-singing in advertising jingles – as a weird variation on a Greek chorus, commenting on the action. In this version, Chloe Hare-Jones, Harun Tekin and Ross Cumming interact visually with Sam and Dinah, and after the interval also with Elle and her lost love.
Iwan Davies conducts the orchestra assembled for this festival production – it’s a large one, too, full and vivid, but whose sound is no problem for Allison Cook. Jake Wiltshire provides the ever-precise lighting.
Walking into the Opera House at Buxton I was wondering whether it would have been wiser to give La Voix Humaine first, with the five voices and lighter tone of Trouble in Tahiti to follow, but seeing them in this order and linked together in this way brings out both the ambiguity of the Bernstein piece’s snapshot and the depth of the tragedy in the Poulenc – a remarkable achievement.
Remaining performance on 25 July; info and tickets here.
