Ivo van Hove and Almodóvar: Remixing The Human Voice

At the opening of La Machine infernale [The Infernal Machine], Jean Cocteau’s 1934 retelling of the Oedipus myth, a voice labels the imminent drama as a “fully wound machine,” whose spring will slowly unwind during its performance. The play’s tragic set-up, we are told, “is one of the most perfect machines devised by the infernal gods for the mathematical annihilation of a mortal.”1 In comparing his tragic dramaturgy to a technical apparatus designed to wreck those embroiled in it, Cocteau—the preeminent multi-hyphenate artist of twentiethcentury France—also looks back on his previous play, La Voix humaine [The Human Voice]. First staged in 1930 at the Comédie-Française, this earlier work has as its keystone the device of the manual telephone, complete with its many idiosyncrasies. As Cocteau’s unnamed female protagonist, on a farewell call with the lover who has left her, finds herself nearing the “annihilation” of a relationship, her anxious resort to the telephone mirrors the play’s witting reliance on that same machine’s theatrical potential.