The Seven Deadly Sins / The Human Voice at Charing Cross Theatre: A Powerful Double Bill of Strength and Vulnerability
The Seven Deadly Sins / The Human Voice at Charing Cross Theatre is an ambitious double bill that brings together two landmark one-woman operas in a single evening. Directed by Alejandro Bonatto and starring Katherine McIndoe, the production pairs Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins with Francis Poulenc and Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice. Though written independently, the two works complement one another remarkably well, creating a compelling exploration of ambition, identity, emotional endurance and the quiet cost of holding oneself together.
The evening begins with Anna setting out on a journey across America, driven by a dream that never quite feels like her own. As music rooted in Weimar cabaret and American jazz fills the theatre, each new city brings another compromise, another expectation and another piece of herself left behind. The movement through these different worlds creates an immediate sense of momentum, while beneath the wit and satire lies an unmistakable sadness that gradually comes into focus.
What works especially well is the way the two operas speak to one another without forcing a connection. The Seven Deadly Sins examines the pressures placed upon a woman from the outside, while The Human Voice turns inward, exploring the emotional aftermath of love, loss and isolation. Together, they feel less like two separate performances than two chapters in the same psychological journey. Alejandro Bonatto's observation that they form "one continuous psychological portrait" becomes increasingly convincing as the evening unfolds.
Katherine McIndoe delivers a captivating central performance, carrying the emotional weight of both operas with remarkable assurance. In The Seven Deadly Sins, she balances sharp wit with quiet vulnerability, allowing Anna's determination to coexist with growing exhaustion. In The Human Voice, that emotional restraint gives way to devastating intimacy. A seemingly ordinary phone conversation slowly unravels into something painfully raw, with every hesitation and change in tone revealing another fracture beneath the surface. One repeated question seems to linger over the production: "How do you say goodbye?" It resonates long after the final note.
Musically, the contrast between the two scores is one of the production's greatest strengths. Weill's lively, jazz-infused writing provides rhythmic energy and biting irony, while Poulenc's score follows the natural patterns of speech with remarkable sensitivity, allowing emotion to emerge almost conversationally. Under the musical direction of Adrian Salinero (The Seven Deadly Sins) and Elspeth Wilkes (The Human Voice), each opera retains its own distinctive musical identity while contributing to a cohesive emotional evening.
The staging remains elegantly restrained throughout. Rather than relying on elaborate spectacle, the production allows lighting, movement and performance to shape the atmosphere. This simplicity proves particularly effective during The Human Voice, where the isolation of a single room and a telephone become all that is needed to create overwhelming dramatic tension. Every silence feels significant, and every pause becomes part of the storytelling.
There are moments where the pace deliberately slows, particularly during the more introspective passages of The Human Voice, but these quieter stretches deepen rather than diminish the emotional impact. They allow the audience to sit with the character's thoughts instead of rushing towards resolution, making the opera's conclusion all the more affecting.
The Seven Deadly Sins / The Human Voice succeeds because it trusts both its material and its audience. Through Katherine McIndoe's compelling performance, Alejandro Bonatto's thoughtful direction and the rich musical worlds created by Weill and Poulenc, the production becomes a moving examination of ambition, vulnerability and the emotional compromises people make in search of love, security and acceptance. It is an evening of opera that feels both timeless and strikingly immediate.
