Sparrow's return

It was Marlene Dietrich who said that, if Paris had to be renamed, it would have to be Piaf.

Edith Piaf was the highest-paid female singer in the world. When she died in 1963, it was estimated that two million people lined the streets of Paris along the funeral route. There were 40,000 mourners at the cemetery.   
Jean Cocteau, in whose plays Piaf had appeared, said that the singer spoke for everyone who had been used or abandoned.

The story, going from the gutter to riches and from the microphone to the syringe, is so familiar that you may feel, especially if you have seen Marion Cotillard's Oscar-winning performance in La Vie En Rose, that there really is no need to see a revival of Pam Gems's 20-year-old play.
And even more so since the film uses Piaf's voice so brilliantly not just in performance but also as a background for the emotional scenes.

Gems opens her play with the distressing image of Piaf as an old woman desiccated by alcohol, drugs, sickness and weighing just 84 pounds.
She has shrunk to four feet seven inches and is crippled by rheumatism.  
She stands there in a little black dress, her voice is guttural and her hands are like claws.
Piaf wasn't old. She was just 48. But she had never quite recovered from the death of her lover Marcel Cerdan, a married boxer, who died in a plane crash.

Gems views Piaf's life in flashback, starting from when she was on the streets working as a singer and prostitute. She is taken up by a nightclub manager who christens her Piaf - French slang for sparrow - and launches her career. The play has been rejigged, rewritten and cut to 90 minutes without interval. Jamie Lloyd's extremely well-handled production gives the songs and snippets from her life a raw treatment, staging the numbers and scenes within the bare walls of a music hall theatre.
One of the most touching moments is when Piaf and the last of her lovers, the gentle, 19 years her junior, gay Leo (Leon Lopez), sing A Quoi Ça Sert l'Amour?

The show is worth seeing for the songs, of course, and the amazing performance of the Argentinian actress Elena Roger, who was last seen in Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Evita at the Adelphi two years ago.  

It is, as always, difficult to listen to Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien and not be moved to tears.

Plays until September 20. Box office: 0870 060 6624.