Pam Gems’s Piaf premiered in 1978 at the RSC’s The Other Place, its stage for new and often experimental work. Starring Jane Lapotaire, who would go on to win a Tony for her performance when the production transferred to New York, it had been conceived as a play with music, with a spare staging and unsparing focus on the brutal aspects of Édith Piaf’s existence. For the 1993 revival, with singer Elaine Paige in the title role, the songs were expanded and so was the running time.
This new production for the Watermill is closer to the 90-minute, trimmed-down, sentimentalised version that Gems rewrote for London’s Donmar Warehouse in 2008. Like its predecessors, it relies heavily on the charisma of its leading performer, who carries the burden of the storyline as a carousel of characters whirls around her. It relies no less heavily on the skills of the ensemble to deliver sharp characterisations without blurring multiple roles – 31 in the original; here, in the cleverly used tiny space of the converted mill, around 20-plus (an estimate; not all are listed in the programme).
