Il segreto di Susanna & La voix humaine

Il segreto di Susanna

All would be going beautifully between the dashing Count Gil and his wife Susanna were it not for a dubious smell of Turkish tobacco at their home as soon as the husband is away for too long… Could the young woman, however obedient and attributed with every virtue, conceal a lover with the complicity of Sante, the servant? 

La Voix humaine

The scene, small, framed with red painted draperies, depicts the uneven corner of a woman’s bedroom; a dark bluish room with an untidy bed on the left, and a door, ajar, leading to a brightly lit white bathroom on the right. In the middle, on the wall, the photographic enlargement of some crooked masterpiece or a family portrait: anyway, an evil-looking picture. […] The curtain unveils a murder bedroom. In front of the bed, on the floor, a woman in a long shirt is lying, as if killed. Silence. The woman sits up, changes her pose and stays still again. Finally, she makes up her mind, stands up, takes a coat from the bed, goes toward the door after stopping in front of the telephone. When she touches the door, there is a ringing. She drops the coat and rushes forward. […] From this minute, she will speak standing, sitting, showing her back, her front, her profile, kneeling behind the back of the armchair, her head cut off, resting on the chair back, she will pace round the room trailing the wire till the end when she falls flat on her face. Then her head will hang down and she will drop the receiver like a stone. […] The style of this act excluding anything akin to brilliance, the author advises the actress who will perform it without his supervision not to show any irony from a hurt woman or any bitterness. The character is a mediocre victim, in love throughout; she tries but one ruse: throw the man a line so that he admits to lying, so that he does not leave her with this petty memory. He wants the actress to give the impression of bleeding, like a limping animal, of ending the act in a room full of blood.  Jean Cocteau