PIAF by Pam Gems. Watermill Theatre. To 24 November
Newbury
PIAF
by Pam Gems
Watermill Theatre, Newbury To 24 November 2001
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS 01635 46044
Review Timothy Ramsden 8 November
Chaotic life and beautiful music caught in this atmospheric dream of a production.I recall the RSC's premiere of Piaf as a tough play of sexual politics ('You've seen me drink; now watch me piss,' the heroine rounded on the men about her) which had some songs because that was the protagonist's line of work.
Picked up as the latest of John Doyle's superb musical productions with the unofficial company he periodically gathers at the Watermill, the accent is different. Politics in the theatre has shifted (and often enough disappeared); Josephine Baird's tough yet fragile chanteuse becomes an existentialist anti-hero. Framed by a concert from Piaf's last, broken years when the voice had become stifled, yelling in agony or fighting off drug-induced demons, Gems' play now seems like a dream-voyage through the life of someone for whom existence was a nightmare and aggression a first-line of response. The sole relief came in the irrepressible music, which gave access to moments of delirious celebration over which tragedy perpetually hovered.
Partly the shift of focus reflects developments in production style and lighting design. So Toine, Piaf's old friend from the tough street days, is summoned up as a memory embodied by Karen Mann isolated in a spotlight atop a piano. Light fades on Mike Afford's Papa Leplee, Piaf's first promoter – he found her singing in the street – as it becomes clear the singer's gangster acquaintances murdered him. Piaf's monologues are spoken into a hand-held microphone, making her personal confessions sound more detached from her than the showpiece songs.
Mann and Afford give notable performances and all the cast double ably as instrumentalists, a band seen, or half-seen on Mark Bailey's dark set, as a group that support, turn their backs or walk out on the singer as she voyages through a career of high success and lonely breakdown.
But Baird's is the central performance, vividly portraying Piaf's restless, highly-wrought temperament. The features strain, whether in occasional delight or frequent agony, the body bends and stiffens as drugs, self-injected into her arm even as La Vie en Rose is pouring from her mouth, take hold. Eventually the mind falls apart and the legs collapse, leaving crashed on the ground a small human bundle which finally rises from all the torment to proclaim its own defiant epitaph, Je Ne Regrette Rien.
Piaf: Josephine Baird
Papa Leplee/Marcel/Pierre: Mike Afford
Madeline: Holly Ashton
Manager/Jacko: Paul Harvard
Toine: Karen Mann
Director: John Doyle
Designer: Mark Bailey
Lighting: Wayne Dowdeswell
Musical Direction: Sarah Travis
Sound: Gary Dixon
2001-11-09 01:33:38