Christine Bovill's Piaf

Interspersing performances of Édith Piaf's best-loved songs with biographical accounts from her life, Christine Bovill's complete and utter adoration of the great French chanteuese is what most resonantes with the audience tonight. While anybody with a passing familiarity with Piaf's life might not learn anything new here—perhaps, as Bovill suggests, you saw 2007's La Vie En Rose—it's the passion and authority with which Bovill talks about performer that captivates.

Bovill hops freely and non-chronologically between different periods of the Frenchwoman's life, covering everything from Piaf's childhood and her rise to fame, to her excessive character and her tragically destined love-affairs. But she's not some bored university lecturer who's told it all countless times before. Nor is she as souless as Wikipedia. For one thing, her interpretations of Piaf's songs (‘L'Hymne á l'amour,’ ‘Milord’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’) try their utmost to emulate Piaf's sheer emotional gravitas, and they certainly come close. But it's also the little details. Bovill talks fondly of her encounter with the writer of many of Piaf's best-known songs at last year's Fringe. And as she's talking about the plane crash and untimely death of Piaf's greatest love (world middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan) a convoy of (rather loud) planes pass overhead, forcing the Glasweigan to stop momentarily. “Something spooky's going on... I think Edith is with us now.”

It's the little moments that convince you that Bovill's love for Piaf (“obssession,” as she puts it) is far from artificial. Bovill's Piaf is a passionate, heart-warming tribute to a life-long idol.