Piaf

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“She was a monstre sacre, a woman of great excess,” says Christine Bovill of her subject in the musical tribute Piaf. The show by contrast is restrained. On an unadorned stage in a bare white room of the National Library of Scotland, Bovill sings Edith Piaf numbers accompanied by a piano. But then the show never promises anything more than a voice. And quelle voice.

Between songs the Glaswegian’s gentle lilt informs the crowd of key events in Piaf’s life, a life whose aggressive intensity is countered by Bovill's sweet understatement. Her choices from Piaf’s repertoire focus on the romances and tragedies of the singer who Bovill has been animating for more years than she cares to mention. Describing how Piaf would gab gladly to the press over carafes of wine, Bovill herself remains enigmatic. How did this petite French teacher grow into her towering talent?

To describe Bovill’s voice as "smoky" doesn’t quite capture the velvet miasma of sound her unassuming figure emits. Sublimely thick, it makes the accompanying piano sound rather impoverished and hollow. If anything Bovill’s incarnation of Piaf is too astonishingly perfect for its messy inspiration. That is until she gives a mite too much to the spirited ‘La Foule’, staggering for breath mid-note. On a stripped down version of ‘La Vie en Rose’ her voice tails off delicately like a spider’s thread to devastating effect. Listening to Bovill’s Piaf will do your ears a favour but may leave your emotions quite shredded.