Review: Connecting Voices at Leeds Playhouse on Saturday 3rd October 2020

THE Covid-secure return of live performance to Leeds Playhouse after nearly seven months of darkness is celebrated in an exciting partnership with Opera North. Connecting Voices utilises every performing space in this redeveloped theatre complex to explore the power of the human voice.

Francis Poulenc based his 1959 opera monodrama La Voix Humaine on Jean Cocteau’s play written thirty years earlier. The escalating sense of despair of a woman abandoned by her lover is more compelling in the spartan immediacy of the Playhouse’ Barber Studio than in the lofty grandeur of an opera house. Soprano Gillene Butterfield is the anguished Elle, a woman whose one-sided telephone conversation with her ex-lover probably leads to suicide. In Cocteau’s play, Elle strangles herself with the telephone cord but the ending of Poulenc’s opera, depending on the production director, tends to be less clear cut. Poulenc’s intricate speech rhythms, his outbursts of lyricism and the tension filled silences as Elle’s desparate phone call repeatedly cuts out are superbly realised by Butterfield. Annette Saunders delivers the richly detailed piano accompaniment.

Krapp’s Last Tape, Samuel Beckett’s acclaimed one-act monodrama, was premiered just four months earlier than Poulenc’s opera. It too presents audiences with a study in isolation. The sixty nine year old Krapp contemptuously comments on tape recordings he made three decades earlier. Is Krapp as big an eejit now as he was then?

It is impossible to take your eyes off Dublin born actor Niall Buggy. He devours bananas, shuffles too and fro carrying biscuit tins full of his precious spool-to-spool tapes and listens to his younger self with explosions of humour, sadness or incredulity. Legions of Father Ted fans will recall Niall’s star turn as Henry Sellars, a sherry swilling TV presenter whose insecure wig fascinates Father Dougal.

And so to the Quarry Theatre for Testament aka Andy Brooks’ performance of his take on the Orpheus myth. The Leeds based rapper and poet has created Orpheus in the Record Shop - a fusion of wry humour, beatboxing and music played live by members of the Orchestra of Opera North. Andy’s communicative powers and his technical wizardry are something else. The socially distanced audience loved this show.

Connecting Voices continues at Leeds Playhouse until 17th October.

Geoffrey Mogridge