Wine, woman and songs

10 April 2012

Edith Piaf's life was something of a nightmare and so is John Doyle's vividly expressionistic revival of Pam Gems's 1978 cabaret tribute to her rough vitality.

Brought up in a brothel, losing a child to meningitis, bereaved of one of her lovers in a plane crash and finally becoming a morphine junky, the Parisian chanteuse knew all about suffering but regretted none of it. She dressed like a widow, swore like a trooper and had a voice like an angel with laryngitis - or, as the writer Jean Cocteau put it, "like an agate stream".

No wonder, then, that Doyle's production treats Gems's play as a bawdy but ghoulish hallucination. The voices of the supporting cast echo as though from a dungeon. You can almost smell the Gauloises and absinthe of the Left Bank cafés. Wayne Dowdeswell's Stygian illumination turns the Water-mill's tiny stage into a prison of darkness with bars of smoky light. Then there's the dirgeful music performed by an on-stage band of actors. An accordion evokes the river Seine as well as Piaf 's dying breath. Trumpets split the air and a double bassist practically fornicates with his instrument like a lustful soul in hell.

As Piaf, Josephine Baird appears to method act her way through the entire show - a dangerous but powerful choice in the portrayal of such a disturbed woman. She haunts the stage like a ghostly puppet with a white face, painted eyebrows and blood-red lipstick. She switches between filthy cockney repartee with the actors and throaty French lyricism with the microphone.

Her smutty, attention-seeking, Woody-Woodpecker laugh does become annoying, but the show stands and falls by the singing. On this score Baird ranges with an easy familiarity over Piaf 's rasping, lovelorn repertoire from Non Je Ne Regrette Rien to La Vie En Rose. If neither of these set your spine tingling you may be from another planet. Go to find out.

The Watermill, Newbury until 24 November. Box office: 01635 46044.

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