La Voix humaine

First edition, one of 110 numbered copies on Rives laid paper.
Half red morocco binding, smooth spine, gilt date at foot, boards covered with abstract patterned paper, red paper endpapers and pastedowns, covers and spine preserved, top edge gilt, signed binding by P. Goy & C. Vilaine.
Autograph inscription signed by Jean Cocteau to a friend named Roger enhanced with a drawing in blue ink representing the face of a young man facing forward.

During the first performance in 1930, L'Echo de Paris already prophesied: "The best actresses in the world will want to interpret La voix humaine."
Indeed, on stage and screen followed Berthe Bovy, Anna Magnani, Simone Signoret, Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren, Ornella Muti, Tilda Swinton... and the opera singers Denise Duval and Felicity Lott, while the greatest directors and composers took up the staging challenges of this atypical work. Among them, Roberto Rossellini, Francis Poulenc or Pedro Almodovar who owes his finest film to Cocteau's play: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios.

A monologue, this variation on waiting, desire and the pain of a woman suffering a telephone breakup, confronts the actress with the deafening silence of the telephone receiver. The tragedy being played offers the spectator only a victim suffering the inaudible attacks of an invisible torturer. The human voice is both that, broken down, of this woman, alternately strong, fragile, proud and destroyed, and that other one, absent, but which strikes the spectator's imagination through what Cocteau calls: "the eternity of silences"