Theatre
Per Edith Piaf
ActionBase Studio

Warm balmy nights and the promise of the theatre summer season sent me to one of the more remote performance spaces available to ActionBase theatre group – a property on the outskirts of Buskett, just beneath Verdala Palace. This studio was recently used to launch a number of activities by the Gruppi Għall-Inkontri tal-Bniedem.

The Italian offering last Friday was a one-woman show by Nathalie Mentha, a member of Teatro Potlach, founded in Fara Sabina, Italy, in 1976. The performance is described as “a musical journey in the France of the 1930s and 1950s through Edith Piaf’s songs. Stories of lives in the environment of French gangsters, stories of women in love, stories of passions, of dreams, of memories.” With a stunning location and the promise of French love songs, Ms Mentha’s act was something I was looking forward to.

A curtain screen in claret velvet was framed by a string of coloured lights and served as her only backdrop, giving it that cabaret edge from the age of monochrome elegance and the shabby chic which characterised the years immediately preceding and following World War II. What Ms Mentha did well was to weave the different narratives of artistes and characters from the era, taking on different personae by the simple switch of a cap or change of a jacket: all in the same colour palette of red and black.

Ms Mentha, presumably French, by her slight accent, delivered the entire show in Italian – a welcome change in our normal fare of English and Maltese productions, making the lyricism of the spoken Italian word mingle seamlessly with the melodic tones of Piaf’s French songs. Bringing to life a rich historical period from the middle of the last century through the songs of one much loved artiste, ran the risk of becoming a mere tribute to Piaf, however, by creating multiple narratives and weaving them together in song, she managed to sustain a good balance between the shadowy aspects of life and the more glamorous ones, bringing together Jacques Prevert’s poetry and Cartier Bresson’s photography with Jean Cocteau’s theatre and De Sica’s filmic vision, without ignoring the destruction wrought by World War II; although this last detail was rather lightly skimmed over. What could have been done better was the lighting at the point when she was addressing the audience from the top of the screen – her features were bathed in half-light which created awkward shadows and didn’t quite help the earnest dialogue she was trying to set up. Showcasing some of Piaf’s earlier repertoire with some of her more famous pieces also worked well because it didn’t milk the artiste for the show-stopping numbers.

While not heavy or deeply moving, Ms Mentha’s performance was a pleasant carousel through a strong period of firsts for art, culture and the human perception of self, whose final message was to never stop believing in love – a message we would do well to remember in this day and age, when the transactional has replaced the emotional as our main mode of thought. When all is said and done, it is our humanity which touches others and helps us make a connection with them, building stronger relationships based on shared experiences.