Pam Gems’s 100-minute salute to the embattled life and feisty yet poignant art of Edith Piaf is sketchy, even scrappy, but then a neat, smooth play would hardly suit its defiantly unneat and unsmooth heroine. In any case, such objections dwindle to cavils, given the quality that the Argentine actress Elena Roger brings to the role of the little sparrow with the big vibrato.

Roger, last seen as Evita, comes across as a diminutive street bird who somehow manages to survive and even flourish in a world of killer cats. She exudes vulnerability yet bravado, natural warmth and generosity yet a necessary toughness. To see the sickly, ageing Piaf totter in her simple black dress towards the mike to pelt out the inevitable Non, je ne regrette rien, her hair a skimpy frizz, her cheeks pale and pinched, her nose a thin beak, her eyes shiny black dots, is to feel you’re seeing the last throes of the singer herself.

Does it matter that she speaks in a foreign accent while the other Parisians sound all-English? Not at all. Could she be brasher, cruder, more vulgar? Maybe, a bit. It doesn’t help that Gems or the revival’s director, Jamie Lloyd, has cut the scene in which, mocked by a waiter for drinking from a fingerbowl, Piaf retaliates by peeing on his nice clean floor. Yet you don’t doubt that she was born and bred in the gutter and never forgot the fact or betrayed her origins. Like other Gems protagonists, notably her Queen Christina and Marguerite Gautier in her Camille, she’s a woman who bravely clings to a precarious integrity in a mainly male universe.

Actually, she has the talent and character, if not finally the strength, to exploit that universe. Piaf liked young men and didn’t stint with sex. I lost count of the studs drawn into her erotic force-field and, though this was partly because there’s too much doubling, certainly couldn’t identify them all. However, Yves Montand makes a brief appearance, as does Charles Aznavour.

The dialogue can get a bit clunky and the play itself becomes pretty frantic as Gems whizzes us from slums to success, taking in crime, war, liberation, husbands, lovers, car crashes, drugs, exhaustion, death. But to hear Roger singing La vie en rose with Katherine Kingsley’s rangy Marlene Dietrich, or even drolly delivering the mawkish Jimmy Brown with a po-faced American choir, is to feel that the sparrow has been reborn in Seven Dials.

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