From Popular Chanson to Swansong

Christine Bovill’s Piaf at the Old Fire Station Oxford on Friday, April 21. Review by JON LEWIS

Edinburgh Fringe Festival favourite Christine Bovill was seriously injured in a car accident three weeks ago and only returned to her ‘cracked rib cabaret’ of Piaf songs for this show in Oxford. It was Bovill’s first time in the city and a packed theatre rapturously received a star whom some had travelled halfway across the country to hear.

Piaf’s story is narrated chronologically, and into this timeline, Bovill also relates her own life history. Her discovery of Piaf at the age of thirteen was an intervention that changed the course of her life as she went on to study French at university. She became a chanteuse in her spare when teaching French and English in schools, and eventually went full time, touring the world with her Piaf-inflected gigs.

Bovill is blessed with a golden voice. Her repertoire of Piaf’s hits of the forties, fifties and sixties has a refreshing, almost old-fashioned buoyancy. She performs into a microphone to the accompaniment of Simon Wallace on keyboard, no frills. Bovill tells the audience that Piaf, a stage name meaning ‘little sparrow’, was discovered in 1935 by an impresario who helped her towards instant fame with her first record, ‘Une fille de joi’ or a lady of the night. This set the tone for Piaf’s often transgressive songs. During the Nazi occupation, Piaf used her global fame to help the Underground identify French prisoners of war. She sold a million copies of her records with songs such as ‘l’accordianiste’ but her personal life was being eaten up by prescription drugs and alcohol.

Bovill's most surprising rendition is a number originally written by Brecht and Weill, ‘the Bilbao song’. This seeps decadence, building on Piaf’s connections with lowlifes and fast lovers with its image of Bilbao as a place ‘where all appetites are satisfied’. Bovill worst moments occured after the sudden death in a plane crash of her boxer-lover, Marcel Cerdan but at the same time, her fame in the US soared with her most famous hits ‘Je ne regrette rien’ and ‘La vie en rose’. A tragic life reappraised quite wonderfully in song.