Two-time Olivier Award winner and Tony nominee Ruth Wilson (Anna Christie, A Streetcar Named Desire) will star in Tony winner Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice next year.
Also helmed by van Hove (who previously directed Wilson in Hedda Gabler), the production will play a limited engagement at London's Harold Pinter Theatre beginning March 17, 2022, prior to an official opening March 22. Performances continue through April 9.
Van Hove's frequent collaborator Jan Versweyveld will design the production.
Wilson, whose screen credits include The Affair, His Dark Materials, and Oslo, said, “I am absolutely thrilled to be collaborating again with Ivo and Jan on this wonderful, heartbreaking, and deeply human monologue from Jean Cocteau. A woman alone with only her phone as companion, Cocteau explores the nature of intimate relations through inanimate objects. In a world in which are all addicted to and dependent on our phones, this play from the 1930s couldn’t feel more prescient. Ivo is the perfect director to bring Cocteau’s play to life as both share a love of the absurd as a mirror to truth.”
Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist, and critic. His additional principal works for the stage include La Machine Infernale, Les Parents terribles, La Machine à écrire, and L'Aigle à deux têtes.
Sonia Friedman Productions presents the stage adaptation, originally produced by Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is artistic director.
