Piaf, Crucible, Sheffield

The Little Sparrow sings on

From the moment she darts on to the stage, pees on the cobbles and bursts into heartfelt song, right up to when she hobbles her way to debilitating illness and death, Anna-Jane Casey turns in a five-star performance as Edith Piaf. The challenge of recreating any legendary figure is a tough one, and it is even harder in the case of so enigmatic a woman, so complex a personality, and so compelling a performer as Piaf. The word "extreme" might have been invented to describe her - huge voice, tiny frame; insatiable appetite for life, rotten luck in love; fêted celebrity, fragile myth in her own lifetime.

As the "Little Sparrow", pecking at every crumb she can, Casey not only sings the songs as if they were her own, but is deft at incorporating tiny mannerisms - the hearty spitting, the restless hands, the urchin-like grin - capturing Piaf's uneasy combination of querulousness, gutsiness and vulnerability. But in Timothy Sheader's production of Piaf for Sheffield's Crucible Theatre, the problem lies in the way the chanteuse's tempestuous, tragic life is somewhat skimmed over in Pam Gems' play.

The first part whizzes us through scenes in which Piaf is transformed from street waif to professional singer. From raggedy dress to fur coat, via a spangly cardigan, she's made a instant star but there are few clues as to what really drove her. Spanning so many events - the brutal murder of Leplée, the nightclub proprietor who discovered her; the plane-crash death of Cerdan, her boxer-lover; the Second World War (here and gone in a flash of the tricolore) - the first act packs in biographical highlights but the picture is monochrome. Her work for the Resistance is hinted at, but her frequent appearances at Nazi soirées is not.

In the longer scenes of the second act, the tempo is slowed and the dynamics enlarged to encompass a wider range of moods and a greater concentration on Piaf's relationships. She moulds and bullies the people around her, giving lovers and songwriters alike the elbow without compunction, and berating her long-suffering manager when he doesn't come up with the gigs. There's little sign of her generosity of spirit, few flashes of tenderness, and an increasing emphasis on her wilful streak of self-destructiveness. Ageing ungracefully, her smile stiffening, hair disappearing, and legs buckling, Casey looks genuinely wracked with pain. She becomes a little old lady at just 47, pathetic and pitiful, following several car accidents that the seemingly indestructible singer survived.

The rest of this small, versatile cast play their many parts with élan, but there is a limit to the variety of personae one man, especially Dylan Charles, playing all of Piaf's lovers, can adopt. However, Alistair David gives a wittily camp portrayal of Marlene Dietrich, sultry and wistful and all bedroom eyes in "Falling in Love Again", and Philip Benjamin is touching as Piaf's final love, a gay Greek hairdresser, joining Casey in "A quoi ça sert, l'amour?".

Both acts take place on one effectively multifunctional set, as hard and grey as Piaf's life itself, whether she is under the harsh spotlight of her stage life or in the relentless grip of the drugs, alcohol and addiction to performing that forced her relentlessly on. And it is the songs that hold the show together, with the help of an excellent little accordion band. Casey captures the French feeling and sentiment of these poignant ballads without ever sounding mawkish. She's at her best in the heart-aching "Hymne à l'amour"; the potent "Les amants d'un jour" (this sung in Gems' touching English translation); Piaf's signature song, "La vie en rose"; and the intense "Mon Dieu".

It's not a show you'd regret going to, but don't expect more than a sequence of great numbers strung loosely together with a collection of grainy snapshots of a life from which the riskier elements and revelatory dimensions appear to have been blanked out.

To 7 April (0114-249 6000)