Practically Piaf ... Elena Roger as the French icon. Photograph: Johan Persson/AFP/Getty
"The most outstanding single performance I have seen this year." This was how the Daily Express's Paul Callan described Argentine actor Elena Roger's performance as Edith Piaf in Jamie Lloyd's new (and now sold-out) production at the Donmar Warehouse.
Johann Hari in the Evening Standard was equally smitten: "She is Piaf," he wrote. "She has folded herself into Edith Piaf so perfectly you cannot see the join." The majority of reviews were similarly superlative-laden. And it is an impressive piece of stage acting. Razor-cheeked and gutter-mouthed, ageing with rare plausibility, Roger excels as the young street kid with the glorious voice who becomes this sad and fragile figure, drug dependent and prematurely aged. It is a captivating performance, spellbinding in the truest sense, a performance that successfully distances itself from Marion Cotillard's Oscar-winning turn in La Vie En Rose. Roger makes the role her own. Even the West End Whingers struggled to find anything to complain about. "Roger is so compelling the Whingers couldn't take their eyes off her."
Susannah Clapp, writing in the Observer, was more muted in her assessment. Roger "blazes as both guttersnipe and diva", she said, before concluding that what the actress was doing was actually "high-grade mimicry rather than re-creation". The Independent's Paul Taylor was among the rare few left unmoved: "Her delivery is huge and gutsy but it does not sound from the gut."
As powerful as the performance is, the play itself, by Pam Gems, trimmed down to 90 minutes for this revival, is not in the same league. Not even close. It is, says Michael Billington, "a rickety star vehicle", while Clapp called it "a "skinny little thing - sparrow-like, you might say". The writing, says the Telegraph's Charles Spencer, is "depressingly trite". I have to agree. Gems' play hurtles through Piaf's life, her lovers, her addictions, never really digging under her skin. It is left to Roger to drag up some sense of who this woman was, what drove her, what sabotaged her.
But, according to Benedict Nightingale, reviewing in the Times: "Such objections dwindle to cavils" alongside Roger's performance. Here, too, I agree; there were many problems with the piece, a couple of wince-inducing lines ("Piaf!" snorts the recently discovered Edith. "What kind of name is that?") but, such was the force of Roger in the title role, they were easy to overlook, at least while sitting there in the theatre, swept up in things, dazzled.
So, with this in mind, can you think of any other instances where the performance outclasses the material by such a degree? Where a production, that might otherwise have skirted mediocrity, is lifted up by the performance at its centre?
