With mostly the same cast (two minor changes) around her, Elena Roger storms the West End as the self-immolating firebird of the Paris gutters to prove that Judy Garland and Amy Winehouse have not lived in vain – they validate a performance like Roger’s which finds glory in gruesomeness, passion in pain and purpose in unbridled sensuality.

Piaf was a victim of her own temperament but she was also a victim anyway, rich or poor, which is why we love her. The show starts with Piaf collapsing on stage at the Paris Olympia and the rest of the cast stripping her tragic life away with her costume until she stands before us semi-naked as the beggar girl with the big voice.

And what a voice Roger has! Without imitating Piaf, or being hampered as Marie Cotillard was in the recent over-long film with the recordings themselves, she strikes every chord of defiant fury in the original French (no sur-titles), as if possessed. Jamie Lloyd’s production is just as fast and ferocious as it was at the Donmar Warehouse, losing little in the transfer.

Some critics complained about the thinness of Pam Gems’s play. But I think the production makes a singular virtue of this apparent weakness in its pace, snapshot cleverness and impressionistic density. One minute we’re in a back room bar, the next it’s the Occupation and Katherine Kingsley’s slinky, unmannered Marlene is celebrating “la vie en rose.”

Luke Evans’s gallery of pin-ups, including Yves Montand, Phillip Browne’s doomed boxer – and what a great physical theatre sequence that is, from ring to bedroom – Lorraine Bruce’s huge whore and Owen Sharpe’s adoring Charles Aznavour all play their parts with deft wittiness, and designer Soutra Gilmour and lighting designer Neil Austin ensure that the smoky intimacies of the Donmar are preserved between the now more imposing black proscenium of the little sparrow’s final stage post.

Roger rules OK, waddling like a wounded duck, splaying her surprisingly large hands like expressive hams, but in many ways the most touching of all the numbers is the ensemble epitaph for “Little Jimmy Brown” (“All the chapel bells were ringing”), a French folk tune that only acquired words when Jim Brown and his sisters added them in 1959 and created one of the biggest Number One hits of the mid-century. We’re moved without really knowing why. Like Piaf herself, the song strikes straight to your heart.

-Michael Coveney

NOTE: The following FOUR-STAR review dates from August 2008 and this production's original run at the Donmar Warehouse.

Having so magnificently made the title role in Evita her own, it was only too inevitable that the Argentinian whirlwind Elena Roger would follow in Elaine Paige’s 1993 footsteps as Edith Piaf. But, guess what: she makes this role in Pam Gems’ 1978 play (premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company starring Jane Lapotaire) entirely her own, too. And, what’s more, she sings it in French.

In so doing, she begs comparison with yet another Piaf, Oscar-winning Marion Cotillard in the recent movie La vie en rose. Whereas Cotillard played the biography of the tragic street singer in all its gory, tremulous detail, elaborating the portrait in the songs, Roger evokes Piaf no less effectively in lightning sketches, making the songs the main conduit of the character.

Gems’ play is deceptively skinny. Howard Davies’ original RSC production was suitably Brechtian, sparse and austere. In contrast, Jamie Lloyd’s Donmar version, so fast it’s almost over before it starts (90 minutes, straight through), has a luminous snapshot quality, framed in Soutra Gilmour’s crumbling baroque proscenium of the Olympia Music Hall and its lush red curtain, lit by lightning flashes on a pock-marked black wall by Neil Austin, played with a headlong, reckless sensuality.

No one has quite suggested the mixture of brittle fragility and mysterious power that Roger projects: it really is incredible that such a big sound comes from such a tiny body. And because she’s learned the songs in French, her articulation is perfect. “La ville inconnue” is scary in its desolate sense of alienation. Her affair with the boxer Marcel Cerdan (Phillip Browne) is fully encapsulated, from ring to bedroom, to fateful aeroplane crash (great sound by Christopher Shutt), in the heart-breaking “Mon Dieu”.

Piaf’s foul-mouthed prostitute friend is played fortissimo by the mountainous Lorraine Bruce, while the nine-man ensemble includes a brusque, watchful Marlene Dietrich from slinky, svelte Katherine Kingsley and equally surprising outlines of Yves Montand (at first a comedy turn) and her acolyte Charles Aznavour by Luke Evans and Stuart Neal.

Whereas the movie made you feel you’d lived every minute of Piaf’s 47 years, Gems’ play more appropriately lets you experience the rapidly self-consuming fire of a great talent, flickering like a moth in the spotlight. And when Roger gives it everything plus extra in “Je ne regrette rien”, there’s only one place for the audience to go: up on its feet.

- Michael Coveney