Some parts just haunt an actor and for Elizabeth Mansfield, Piaf is such a role, reports CHARLES HUTCHINSON

BORN 1915, died 1963, whatever account of Edith Piaf's life is presented by Pam Gems in Piaf, it cannot be the whole truth. Mystery and myth still surround the Parisian chanteuse, as it did in her troubled career, but this musical play does convey the heart of 'Little Swallow'.

Damian Cruden is directing a new production at York Theatre Royal, which opens on June 1 with the Olivier Award-winning Elizabeth Mansfield in the title role that she has made her own (you may recall her playing Piaf previously at Harrogate Theatre).

Damian says Piaf is a memory play, a story-telling play, a blur of haunting delusion and truth with the songs as its heartbeat: "The play thrives on the music and its power is in the nature of those songs and who created those songs. Piaf is only truly alive in those songs; that's where she blossoms, and the tension between how she is on stage and off stage is what drives this play."

Analysing Piaf's rise to fame, her roller-coaster lifestyle and her never-ending search for true love, Damian says: "She was a very crude woman, whose background was of no family, or not what we would recognise as one, and she had no structure to her life. It was a cosmopolitan feral life, where a very wild, exposed childhood created a woman who was mistrustful of love and fearful of relationships."

Never settling, forever affected by the plane-crash death of her one great love, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, and rattling through young lovers towards the end of her life, Piaf filled her songs with despair and nostalgia.

"They are story songs, strong songs, street songs, telling of heartache, lost love, unfaithfulness, death, prostitution; stories that sing of the working class, stories that come out of the gutter and speak of hard lives, poverty and no hope," says Damian. "These songs, with their beautiful, haunting tunes, encapsulate the drama of her life."

Explaining his casting of Elizabeth Mansfield, Damian says: "What Elizabeth brings is an incredible depth of understanding of the character and she has that maturity about her that meant she was relishing the chance to have another go at playing Piaf. With actors, there are parts they want to do again, and this was the one for her."

Piaf, York Theatre Royal, June 1 to 22. Box office: 01904 623568. N.B. Piaf contains swearing and scenes of a sexual nature.

Updated: 09:06 Friday, May 24, 2002