‘I can’t speak a word of French!’ – Jenna Russell on playing Edith Piaf
Don’t ever ask Jenna Russell to do a big tap number. “I can’t dance to save my life,” she says, even though she had to do the lot – ballet, tap and modern – at drama school. “I was appalling at all of them,” she adds. But who needs great footwork when you have a voice that can break hearts? Russell’s powerful singing has made her one of Stephen Sondheim’s favourite performers. And she’s now taking on an iconic artist who was also more about the drama than the dancing: Edith Piaf.It’s a daunting role. In Pam Gems’ bawdy feminist biodrama Piaf, which opens shortly at Nottingham Playhouse, the French singer is rarely offstage, singing, snarling and swearing with abandon. “It’s scary,” says Russell, “because I can’t speak a word of French. Not a word.” She admits to being slightly relieved when lockdown intervened, because it gave her longer to learn Piaf’s feisty repertoire. She’s been working with French actor Félicité du Jeu and “sitting on the Spotify account, rewinding and trying to write down the sound. And there’s 90 pages of dialogue!”Speaking via Zoom just before rehearsals begin, Russell is also finding ways to tackle Piaf’s distinctive, nerve-jangling alto wail. “Often my voice seems to die halfway through rehearsals and then builds up again around the music. It’s like moulding it, I guess – like a plaster cast of the show.” She describes Piaf’s voice as “a genuine, earthy, honest sound. I think that was why she connected to people – it was the sound of their mother or aunt, the sound of the streets.”
Piaf was always more scrappy Parisian urchin than big city sophisticate. After years of alcohol abuse, she died of a ruptured aneurysm due to liver failure at the age of 47. Her last words were: “Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.” Russell, who is 53, was born in London but grew up in Dundee and her itinerant childhood, although hardly as rough, was still pretty chaotic. Does she hold her early days close? “Certainly. I’ve always been grateful that, as an actor, you can feel things and explore them. I’m not frightened of doing that. I’ve always been honest that I did have a tricky childhood. I think that’s why I’ve made sure my adult life is really sorted. I’m not one for dramas.”
It was an attempt to redirect that rocky childhood that led her to acting. “Me and my mum had been apart for quite some time,” she says, “but she got a council flat when I was 14.” Russell had felt lost in a series of vast schools, but her stepfather’s best mate had a son at Sylvia Young’s drama school in London. “He said half the kids are there because they’re genuinely talented and the other half because they can’t cope with school.” Russell was sold.
Her audition began shakily: the purple-haired teenager had never sung to piano accompaniment. So everything rested on the longest speech she could find in Romeo and Juliet. “I decided to walk up to the corner of the room and spin around to start. I remember thinking, ‘If you fuck this up then it’s another big comprehensive school for you.’ I don’t know what I did, but Sylvie said, ‘That’s all right’ – and popped me in.”When Russell last met Young, she admitted that she and her mum didn’t remember actually paying for the classes. “And Sylvie said, ‘You needed to be there.’ That’s all she said. And she was right. Those two years were the happiest times of my childhood. I found my tribe. It was bohemian – crazy but wonderful.”
She also found a career that cannily resisted labels, pinballing from the RSC to EastEnders, from Sondheim to surreal cult plays such as Mr Burns. In musicals, a formative experience was appearing in Girlfriends by Howard Goodall. “At Oldham Coliseum, he went to the back of the auditorium and said, ‘I can’t hear you.’ I suddenly found my chest voice, this belt voice I never knew I had – and then you couldn’t stop me. I’d walk into auditions and belt at everybody.”
After years of balancing stage and screen, she now has a simple philosophy: “Fuck it, I want to do what makes me happy. With the kind of musicals that I like to do, there are brilliant roles for women. Sondheim can’t write a bad female part – they’re all extraordinary. You can be a ballbreaker, hilarious, heartbreaking, desperate.” She won especial praise for Sunday in the Park With George and Merrily We Roll Along, and in Sondheim’s wake have come category-defying US shows including Grey Gardens, Fun Home and The Bridges of Madison County. Russell was in the British premieres of all three.
Covid put paid to several juicy projects and gnawed at her savings, although she directed her energies into exploring sweary embroidery and Korean stitching. “I’ve turned into some sort of weird Victorian lady,” she says. But she’s desperate to encounter audiences again. “People get it wrong: they think it’s about the actor getting applause, but it’s about sharing a story.”
Piaf will be followed by a solo show at Cadogan Hall in London. “When I’ve done concerts I always feel I’m shit at it,” she says, somewhat surprisingly. “You walk on stage in a frock, open your mouth and sing Send in the Clowns and walk off. It feels weird. If I can chat or tell a story and then sing, it feels more forgiving. But you’ve got to terrify yourself every now and then.”
Piaf is at Nottingham Playhouse, 2-17 July, and Leeds Playhouse, 23 July-7 August.