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Piaf, Nottingham Playhouse, review: the spirit of the 'little sparrow' soars

A defiant spirit: Jenna Russell as Edith Piaf - Marc Brenner
A defiant spirit: Jenna Russell as Edith Piaf - Marc Brenner

Originally slated to run in 2020, Pam Gems’s homage to the turbulent life and fiery torch songs of Edith Piaf (first staged by the RSC in 1978) is an impressionistic take on the world-renowned chanteuse’s journey from squalor to glamour that still fascinates us nearly 60 years after her death. If the episodic nature of Gems’s script and Nottingham Playhouse artistic director Adam Penford’s deft direction feel like a whistle-stop tour through the defining moments of Piaf’s extraordinarily eventful life, this seems fitting. It’s a metaphor for the whirlwind pace at which she lived.

Born Édith Giovanna Gassion in 1915 and abandoned by her parents, Piaf was brought up in a brothel. As a teenager, she became a street singer and acrobat, performing throughout Paris. In 1935, Louis Leplée, a cabaret owner, discovered her on the streets of the Pigalle area of Paris. He persuaded her to perform at his club and dubbed the singer, who was less than five feet tall, La Môme Piaf - “The Little Sparrow” - which she adopted as her stage name. She would be implicated in Leplée’s gang-land murder but was later acquitted.

After the Second World War, she began touring Europe and the US and for a time was the highest paid female singer in the world. All of this was punctuated by many, many lovers including actor Yves Montand and singer Charles Aznavour. The married boxer Marcel Cerdan, the love of her life and whose prowess in the boxing ring is depicted in beautifully realised choreography by Georgina Lamb, died in a plane crash. Cerdan’s death, exacerbated by several near-fatal car crashes, triggered the addiction to alcohol and morphine that would blight the rest of Piaf’s career and hasten her death at 47, from liver cancer a year after marrying Theo Sarapo who was 20 years her junior. There’s a lot of Piaf’s life squeezed into this ambitious 140 minute production but the confidence of this production never makes this a problem.

The Olivier Award-winning actress Jenna Russell, is a robust presence on stage and portrays the chanteuse with a brisk efficiency that captures Piaf’s abrasively ribald persona and gutsy, emotionally charged voice - “at least you can hear her over the cutlery” - in the musical set pieces that also signal scene changes against the backdrop of tattered posters of the singer. When Russell performs a gorgeous duet of Piaf’s iconic song La Vie en Rose with Laura Pitt-Pullford (portraying Marlene Dietrich), it serves to highlight the lifelong friendship between the two women and draws murmurs of appreciation from the audience.

It’s a bit of a stretch to imagine 53-year-old Russell as a late teen but she invests these early scenes with the crude sass, if not the vulnerability, that rings true as Piaf’s. Does it matter that Piaf and best friend Toine (Sally Ann Triplett) have broad Cockney accents when German and American characters speak in their native accents? Maybe a little bit in the beginning but that is soon forgotten as the standout performances make this production a convincing portrait of a woman who lived on her own terms.

Until July 17; nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk