PIAF. To 7 April.
Sheffield
PIAF
by Pam Gems
Crucible Theatre To 7 April 2004
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat 31 March, 3,7 April 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 15 min One interval
TICKETS: 0114 249 6000
www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 March
Skilled staging but who's been changing the script?Someone's been playing with Piaf, Pam Gems' play about the feisty French street-singer who became a star. First seen in the late 1970s at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon with Jane Lapotaire as the tough kid with the mesmeric voice, the songs were integrated into the story of rise and decline, bad tempered wilfulness becoming cash-fuelled alcohol and drugs-dependency.
In Sheffield director Timothy Sheader re-unites with Anna-Jane Casey, following their success in the Crucible's 2002 Christmas Sweet Charity. With musical numbers printed in the programme, and Casey giving a well-acted performance (she's clearly more than a mere musicals Madonna) that still doesn't quite reach the deep fury and despair of this woman in a man's world, the Crucible offers a spikey but non-threatening musical, with most numbers receiving audience applause.
The trouble is, that's not what they songs are there for. Gems establishes her approach in the early scenes, where most mutilation seems to have occurred. We open with Piaf emptying her bladder upstage (on Robert Jones' aptly cold cobbled street-surface which permeates the action throughout) before setting a handkerchief down for donations as she sets about busking.
It's a poor substitute for the original, where Piaf defies the people who celebrate her as the latest thing they've seen her drink, now they can watch her piss. And there's sentimentality in Emile, boyfriend of her first manager (shot by Piaf-linked gangsters) replacing the woman friend with whom Edith started out, someone known from pre-fame days. Piaf's wartime Resistance work is reduced to sketchy brevity, ending in against-the-wall sex, overriding the picture of her courage.
Plenty is left from the later, drugged and dangerous-driving years when she could afford fast cars but couldn't be bothered learning to drive. What results is sentimental pseudo-tragedy. Which is what many musicals go for with great success. It's well played, beautifully staged and lit, with a microphone stand repeatedly illuminated as the one anchor in Piaf's turbulent life, moving round the stage as her career takes her all places en route to destruction. Good tough fun, but hardly Piaf in full flight.
Piaf: Anna-Jane Casey
Actors: Don Gallagher, Alistair David, Dylan Charles, Philip Benjamin
Director: Timothy Sheader
Designer: Robert Jones
Lighting: Tim Mitchell
Sound: Nick Greenhill
Musical Director/Arranger: Philip Bateman
Fight director: Alison de Burgh
Voice coach: Andrew Wade
Assistant director: David Newman
2004-03-30 12:24:44