On Friday night I witnessed a singer drugged off her head, falling over on stage and living her offstage life for all to see. See Amy Winehouse, your shtick ain't new. Owen, Sharon & Eamon joined me in the front row of the Donmar circle to see the 30th anniversary production of Pam Gems' play PIAF.

The original production made a star of Jane Lapotaire and co-starred Zoe Wanamaker and Ian Charleson and had it's London debut at the same theatre. I saw Elaine Paige in the 1993 London revival and now we have a revised version starring Argentinian actress Elena Roger.

It was a bit of an odd evening. As fine as it is to celebrate it's 30th anniversary, it comes a scant year after Marion Cottilard's Oscar-winning role in LA VIE EN ROSE. Now the film has problems - it seems to last 27 years for a start - but at least it gives significant weight to certain events in Piaf's life, in particular her relationship with boxer Marcel Cerdan, the great love of her life. The play, um, doesn't. It's written with short hard-hitting scenes to be played by a small cast of actors playing about 4 speaking parts each. Now for a reason known only to himself the director Jamie Lloyd has the play performed at breakneck speed which raises more problems than it solves with it's running time of 95 minutes. The original was over 2 hours!
The scenes whizz past at a rattling rate leaving you sometimes flailing with actors meeting themselves going off as they come back on. The worst moment for this being when an actor playing her husband who caused a car crash she was injured in assaults her in a hospital, walks off then reappears in the same costume but now playing the proprietor of the Olympia arguing with Piaf's manager! The afore-mentioned relationship with Cerdan is covered in a scene of Edith watching him box then a post-coital scene - and that's it. At times I felt like I was watching a staged trailer for the film. With the male cast kept so busy it's hard for any of them to make much of an impression but Luke Evans as an oddly-characterised Yves Montand has great fun with his painful country & western number and Leon Lopez has a calming presence as her last husband Theo. The supporting actresses have more chances to shine: Lorraine Bruce is an outrageously bawdy Toine, Piaf's streetwalking friend and Katherine Kingsley is a (very) tall & practical Marlene Dietrich.
But of course the show has at it's centre a blazing performance by Elena Roger.

There have been some reviews which peeved that the show is just a tour-de-force for Roger.... but when you're playing Edith Piaf that's what you have to give - what would be the point of seeing the play if the actress in it gave a merely adequate performance? To make the play work you need a huge blazing performance and Elena Roger seizes the part and pours everything she has into it.

I never saw her performance in EVITA a few years back but here she gives a remarkable performance for it's sheer physicality, she is rarely off-stage and she throws herself into the onstage shagging and being knocked about by her early lovers to the later years of crippling pain and morphine addiction. It is admirable that she never attempts to play Edith for sympathy - which would go against the grain of the script anyway - and of course she interprets the songs well although she does not have as natural a belt as Piaf had.

The show has sold out at the Donmar unsurprisingly but there is talk of a transfer to a west end theatre possibly later in the year.