Kim Sheehan | Interview
Following her lunchtime concert with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, November sees soprano Kim Sheehan tour Ireland in a production of Francis Poulenc’s one-act opera The Human Voice, in which she takes the only role. Produced by Opera Theatre Company and first given at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August, The Human Voice is paired with Susanna’s Secret by Wolf-Ferrari (featuring singers Rachel Croash and Rory Musgrave), with both works directed by Tom Creed and accompanied by pianist Andrew Synnott. We spoke to Sheehan about her work in The Human Voice.
The original play (La Voix Humaine) by surrealist Jean Cocteau was staged in Dublin as recently as 2009. Poulenc’s musical setting creates a drama for soprano that intensifies Cocteau’s script. As Sheehan explains, the story concerns “an actress, breaking up with her lover… someone well-to-do in society… who’s left her for another woman. It’s all about the final breakup, their last phone call.”
There are no distractions: the drama focuses solely on the unnamed woman, her memories, and the telephone in her hand (updated to an iPhone for this production) – even the man’s voice is unheard. It unfolds in real time. “There is a heightened sense of drama… of constant peaks and troughs. Her breakup is like the ocean, it keeps hitting the shore over and over again, as the pain keeps hitting her because he won’t admit that he’s lied and she desperately loves him – she knows that it’s over, but she just wants him to honour their relationship.”
As a performing role, the woman of The Human Voice brings special demands which especially drew Sheehan: “I feel there has to be a closer link between drama and the operatic voice… of a way for theatre and music to come together, and I believe that this is what the opera represents. So in this way you have the theatrical side of things, the whole exposition of what it is to perform a drama, and then you have the actual drama itself – her emotions and her very intimate feelings – and then you have some very complex music as well, all mixed in together.”
The Human Voice is a short opera, but demanding as a solo role: “Rehearsing was quite intense because you can’t simply let the music do the work; the singer has to drive the drama at all times. Every single line is a reaction to what he [the lover] is saying on the phone – it’s very much about the words, and luckily we’ve got a very good English translation by Richard Stokes. I’ve a lot to hold onto: it’s all about getting the words out there, and making sure that the audience understand every word I sing, every facial expression, every reaction. It’s only 45-50 minutes long, depending on how long the pauses are, but when I get through to the other end I do feel quite tired!”
As well as the Kilkenny Festival in August, Sheehan also performed The Human Voice at Electric Picnic, which took the challenges to a whole new level. “Just to do the show on its own – in the theatre with darkness, no noise, no distractions, just me on the stage – is intense enough but, as you know, in Electric Picnic we were in the theatre area, backing onto all these enormous tents, and the noise… All the silences in the piece are me listening for what to say next, and all through them I just kept hearing the boom-boom-boom from another tent – it was a real challenge. But there were quite a few people in the audience and they were completely mesmerised by the whole thing, by the fact that there was an opera singer at this type of festival, so it was really wonderful, I’m really glad we did it.”
The experience of having sung other music by Poulenc deepened her engagement as well. “I sang a lot of his songs when I was in college, and then I was in [his opera] Dialogues of the Carmelites when I was studying at the Royal College of Music in London. That piece was a big turning-point in his career, it symbolised so much of his life, and his relationships, which he wanted to bring into that music. There’s actually a lot of that in The Human Voice as well, and a lot of the same themes – those glistening chords just come in and you’re like ‘oh! that’s from Dialogue of the Carmelites’ and so it’s easy to make the link. In Carmelites the characters all sacrifice themselves to the higher good, and there is an element of that in The Human Voice as well, that she is sacrificing herself for the greater good.”
It’s great to make those connections... “Oh yes, it’s just so wonderful. After I had done those first two performances in Kilkenny, I just felt how good this music is, it just comes off the page. In the spoken parts, where she’s completely alone, without accompaniment, the music mainly hangs around diminished chords the whole time, so you don't really know what she’s thinking, or what she could do next. She could get really angry, or then she’ll come down another diminished scale and her mood could have dissipated and she begins to flirt or so, and the music is extraordinarily good.”
Sheehan also has new projects on the horizon, though the present funding environment in both Ireland and the UK demands a good deal of patience: “Off the back of the Poulenc I’ve been asked to act in a play in England, so I’m looking to do that. A lot of the projects I’m involved in right now are still waiting for funding, so I can’t talk about them, but I have been asked by an Irish composer to help him write an opera. I’m doing concerts in England and in Ireland, and as well as that I put a musical project together: a band called the Second Moon of Winter, using opera vocals in a quite alternative, ambient, avant-garde type of musical context. It’s where I want to be, to be using the training I have to try to do things a little bit differently, and also keep up doing concert and operatic repertoire, that’s my first true love. But that’s why the Poulenc is important to me as well: because I want to start trying different things.”
The Human Voice tours Ireland 11-24 November. For details, see opera.ie