There is nothing like the allure of showbusiness stars who fight long, losing battles with sex, drugs and bad luck, singing their wounded hearts out as they go down.  

Argentinian actress-singer Elena Roger should cause a big West End stir with her magical performance as Edith Piaf — that working-class cabaret and music-hall legend who looked for love in all the wrong places and unsurprisingly failed to find it.

Roger was first applauded when she played Piaf this summer at the Donmar. Success has propelled her to this larger theatre, where Jamie Lloyd’s soft-focus production, acted on Soutra Gilmour’s bare stage, a replica of a music-hall proscenium, rushes along like a March hare on speed. There are few traces of Parisian atmosphere, except when Roger’s French-sounding Edith sings to accordion and piano: we might as well be in Frinton-on-Sea as France. Piaf’s best friend — Lorraine Bruce’s Toine — sounds fresh from EastEnders.
 
Roger’s role is a daunting one, fraught with stumbling blocks: she needs and manages to rise above the glaring limitations of Pam Gems’s banal, helter-skelter script, which betrays a belief audiences are dim and ignorant by having characters tell each other what they would already know. “Countrymen, countrywomen, I have to tell you it is war, war!” an impresario announces.

“You’re the best, highest-paid woman-singer in the world,” the coarse-mouthed Piaf is informed by Katherine Kingsley’s languid, lifelike Marlene Dietrich. Edith is reduced to cliché status, to a rags- to-riches life-journey of decadence that takes in gangsters, Nazis, the black market, young hommes fatales, including Luke Evans’s hilariously inept, would-be cowboy singer, an almost fatal motor accident and the morphine addiction that follows it.

The tiny, black-dressed Roger makes the evening work, thanks to the enraptured intensity which characterises her singing. She charts Piaf’s inexorable, physical decline with devastating precision and ends up as a tottering, splay-footed life-casualty, decked out in makeshift shorn hair. Non Je Ne Regrette Rien becomes a defiant requiem. Roger may lack the throb and rolling “r’s” of Piaf’s singing, but she catches Edith’s essence. The song that best defines her — Hymn To Love — is delivered in English and celebrates a wild, romantic Eros for which the singer would gladly die. Again and again Roger conveys this impassioned fatalism with poignant ardour. The audience rise to her.

Until 24 January. Information 0844 412 4663.