Theatre review: Marvellous music in Piaf, but overall a disappointment
Kwaku Fortune and Camille O’Sullivan star in the Gate Theatre’s production of Piaf. Picture: Agata Stoinska
★★☆☆☆
There are 24 songs in Piaf, Pam Gems’ 1978 play about the French chanteuse; or, to put it another way, 24 reasons to see this production, give or take. To find any more is more tricky.
The problem for anyone looking for a satisfying evening’s theatre begins and ends with Gems’s dated text. It’s a cavalcade of scenes, a tumble through the decades of Piaf’s short life, with barely a pause for anything like character development, emotional depth, or continuity. Life is one damn thing after another, ain’t it? Well, it certainly is here as we zoom from Piaf’s urchin days to her angry, chaotic apogee as a national icon, and her swift drug-addled decline.
The young Piaf is played by Zara Devlin, with convincing streetwise toughness and moxie. She speaks in a strong Dublin accent when not singing en francais. Most of the songs remain in their original French.
Camille O’Sullivan is quite convincing as the mature Piaf. Dowdily dressed, bawdy and crass, she retains a sharp edge that rubs up against the world. Only behind the microphone, raspy-voiced, is her true, vulnerable self revealed. Away from it, we get little sense of what was magical and meteoric in Piaf’s rise from Belleville backstreets and bordellos to Carnegie Hall.
Director Des Kennedy makes good use of a revolving stage, deft transitions, and a talented ensemble to add some elegance and coherence to the succession of scenes, but really it’s an impossible task.
Rory Nolan’s talents have rarely been so underused, though Aoife Mulholland charms in a wonderful impersonation of Marlene Dietrich, showing in one polished song that art doesn’t always have to be so wrenchingly personal to be convincing.
It comes down to the music, then, and it worked its magic, as the audience on the night jumped to an instantaneous ovation. Episodic as Piaf may be, it appears nonetheless that the Gate’s production will be a hit.
