Ruth talks her way back on stage ...
RUTH WILSON will return to the London stage as the tragic heroine of Jean Cocteau’s tale of heartbreak, The Human Voice, in which a woman fights for the man she loves.
The actress told me in September that she had theatre plans for 2022, but refused to divulge the name of the play. However, I can reveal that Wilson will star in Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Cocteau’s 1930 ‘voice play’ about an abandoned woman’s one-sided telephone conversation, as she begs her former lover not to marry another woman.
Wilson, van Hove and producer Sonia Friedman began talking about the idea of doing The Human Voice several years ago, when the actress appeared — on blistering form — in van Hove’s modern-day production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the National Theatre.
The Human Voice will begin performances at the Harold Pinter Theatre in early spring. Van Hove premiered his take on Cocteau’s play in Amsterdam in 2009. It has since been performed in New York, Dublin and Sydney.
The monologue can also be seen on screen, starring Tilda Swinton in a version directed by Pedro Almodovar, set in an opulent Madrid apartment.
Wilson has enjoyed enormous success on TV, with brilliant roles in The Affair, Luther, His Dark Materials, Jane Eyre, Small Island and Mrs Wilson; and on the big screen — in Dark River, The Little Stranger and Saving Mr Banks. (Her latest, True Things, is out on March 11.)
But she’s breathtaking live on a theatre stage. She scooped two Olivier awards in three years for performances in Anna Christie and A Streetcar Named Desire, both directed by Rob Ashford at
the Donmar Warehouse.