Audrey Brisson was born to play this part

The star’s blazing turn as Edith Piaf is the reason to see to this revival of Pam Gems’ sometimes sketchy 1978 demi-musical about the legendary French chanteuse

Now and again, you watch a performance in which the inhabitation of a character is so skilful and deep that you can’t help but think this actor was born to play that part.

Such is the case with Audrey Brisson’s blazing turn in this revival, at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury, of Pam Gems’s demi-musical drama about the life, loves and losses of the great 20th-century French chanteuse Edith Piaf.

Gems’s play had its premiere at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978 before shifting to various West End locations and eventually landing on Broadway, where Jane Lapotaire won a Tony award in the title role.

It is in many ways a slight, sketchy piece of work, distilling Piaf’s 47 years (she died in 1963) into just 20 scenes. The Brechtian economy of Gems’s warts-and-all approach occasionally verges on the ridiculous. Significant episodes and relationships in Piaf’s life are dispatched in minutes or even moments, with the playing out of them sometimes rendered in broad, cartoonish strokes.

Still, the script is very playable. And how much can one complain given Brisson’s utterly magnetic brio? Kimberley Sykes’s smart, snappy production is simply, elegantly set against a slightly gilded back wall and red curtain. Everything in it — including the work of a versatile supporting cast of nine actor-musicians and Michela Meazza’s astute movement direction — is really at the service of one performance. And rightly so.

Brisson shot to attention in the Watermill’s 2019 production of Amélie, a musical adaptation of the film that subsequently transferred to the West End. Here she grabs us from the get-go, her Piaf a stooped and petite figure hobbling across this charming venue’s small stage with a mixture of purpose and discovery.

Brisson’s embodiment of the character embraces a panoply of contradictions, charting Piaf’s rise from a tough, earthy and promiscuous Parisian guttersnipe, whose gift as a singer propels her to stardom, to her final days as a fragile ex-addict, old and broken before her time.

The truth and sheer force of Brisson’s portrayal transcends any potential for rags-to-riches cliché. It helps that, to her credit, Gems’s script doesn’t try to explain Piaf. Nor does Brisson. She doesn’t need to. Rather, she just lives — and sings, with charismatic strength and passion — the role. The pay-off is tremendous.

DONALD HUTERA

Audrey Brisson a tour de force in Watermill’s triumphant Piaf

The Watermill theatre’s Piaf by Pam Gems is a resounding triumph!

Audrey Brisson returns to Newbury following her critically acclaimed run of Amélie in 2019.

She gives a charismatic tour de force performance as the “Little Sparrow” Edith Piaf, the French chanteuse who was brought up in a brothel and lived on the bawdy streets of Pigalle working as a prostitute, together with her loyal friend Toine (Tzarina-Nassor). It’s a life filled with drugs, alcohol and many men, but she has a passionate desire to sing.

Brisson inhabits the character of Piaf with a raw energy, from her early years singing in clubs through her many intense love affairs and husbands to becoming the highest paid international star before spiralling into developing cancer and a morphined driven world filled with pain until her untimely death at 47.

Her life was often precarious. During Nazi occupied France she navigated messages to French prisoners, entertained officers and saved many children. She now had an agent Marlene (Signe Larsson) who although has had no experience in this role manages her turbulent progress and becomes friends.

The highly talented ensemble of nine actor-musicians play a variety of instruments from accordions to brass and woodwind with a vibrant rich score by Sam Kenyon while impressively multi-roling the other characters. The exuberant street scenes perfectly captured the Parisian chaos.

Piaf’s story is told through her songs, sung both in French and English with favourites such as Lili Marlene, the close harmony Jimmy Brown and the moving Hymn to Love. Signe Larsson makes a commanding Marlene Dietrich with a sensual rendition of La Vie en Rose and supports Piaf during her American tour, which turns out to be not a huge success.

Kimberley Sykes’ astute direction confidently moves the action on in a series of well-rounded vignettes complimented by Prema Mehta’s striking lighting.

The final song Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien was so poignant and summarised Piaf’s whole heart rending life. But the evening belongs to Brisson and this outstanding production richly deserved its tumultuous applause and standing ovation at the end.

Not to be missed.

TRISH LEE