Stage school - Elena Roger

Published Friday 10 October 2008 at 17:15 by Mark Shenton

After proving her star quality in Evita, Elena Roger went on to play an Italian air stewardess and now a French singer. It’s given her the education she never had, she tells Mark Shenton

In Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita, Eva Peron announces her arrival in the big city by declaring, “I get out here, Buenos Aires/Stand back, you oughta know whatcha gonna get in me/ Just a little touch of star quality”.

And two summers ago, when the Buenos Aires-based musical theatre actress and dancer Elena Roger made her West End stage debut in the title role of that show, that’s precisely what she delivered - in spades.

I saw it five times in all, drawn like a moth to the flame of an incendiary, incandescent performance that burnt up the stage and is now forever etched in memory as one of the greatest I have ever seen in a musical anywhere.

She utterly inhabited the part with fierceness, passion, exhilaration and excitement, as well as a piercing sadness - there wasn’t a phoney moment in the way she totally owned the stage.

So perhaps she is right, when I meet her backstage at the Donmar Warehouse before she completes her run there in the title role of Pam Gems’ Piaf, ahead of a move to the West End this month, that the pressure is much higher now.

“Nobody knew me here before Evita, or had any idea of what I can do - so I just enjoyed it,” she says.

“But with this new thing, they now know me a bit. And then the competition is not really with others - it is with yourself. And that’s hard.

“But I had to learn it doesn’t matter, if something is less good than the other thing - you just have to try to do your best, and sometimes people won’t like it.”

In fact, the critics have fallen once again under her spell - including me. I declared that, though she has far skimpier dramatic material to work with here than she did in Evita, she brings such a depth and charge to the songs that it seems like she’s channelling Piaf herself - exposing raw guts rather than glitter.

However, what I didn’t know when I saw the show was what a challenge Roger had set herself - she didn’t know French before she took the role. “I didn’t know a word!”, she admits. “But the songs I think are okay now - a lot of French people come to see the show and then they want to speak to me in French after, so that’s a good sign.”

But then Roger’s English wasn’t good, either, when she first came to perform in London - and although she’d served a long apprenticeship on the Buenos Aires stage, she never dreamt she’d ever appear here, because of the language barrier.

“The first time I came to London with my sister ten years ago, we saw five musicals - we spent only five nights here so every night we went to see one,” she recalls.

“I thought it was amazing. London has this culture of the theatre that is so big, it was a like a dream - but I never had a thought to be able to play here, because my English was not very good. So being given the opportunity to come work here was like a gift.”

It helped, of course, that Evita was a natural fit. “I was very lucky, the only way to come to the West End was to be doing an Argentinian role,” she says.

But what’s interesting is that she’s followed it with an Italian role - her stewardess in Boeing-Boeing, which revealed a rare and spontaneous gift for comedy - and now a French one.

“I’ve been learning a lot here, improving things and having a lot of different experiences,” she acknowledges. But she’s also faced a series of challenges, too.

“It was a new place and a new language,”she says. “Being away from home and with my family so far away, there were a lot of changes - and a lot of growing up, as a person, too.”

In fact, the actress - who turns 34 this month - admits that the work she is doing now is providing her with the formal education she missed out on earlier.

“I didn’t go to University, and I always had in my mind that I hadn’t studied properly,” she says. “I went to the Conservatory, studying piano and singing, up to high school - but I only did four years because I then had to start working, and the jobs were so good that I didn’t stop.

“I feel that working now is the way for me to learn things, whether it’s languages or another activity. I just did a tango cabaret show in Adelaide, Australia, and I learnt to dance tango, as well as a folklore dance that we use in our country, and I practiced my guitar more for it, too.

“Then I wondered, why does it have to be so difficult every time I have to do a show?’ But it is a way for me to enrich my life.”

And it’s that richness that she brings to her stage performances. Of Evita, she says: “It was very exhausting for my body - I had to dance, and the singing was a huge range and emotionally big.”

But Piaf has proved to be an even bigger challenge.

“This is an acting piece, and her life is so full of life and emotional things,” says Roger. “It is a great drama, and emotionally it is very big for me. I’m on stage almost all the time, but the journey of the character is very good and very fast. I enjoy it very much.”

Roger has staked a lot on this chapter of her career - including the air fare for her own first auditions for Evita. “I had an Argentinian friend who works in the Really Useful Group, and she told them about me - she showed them my CV and a video of me,” she recalls. “They said that if I wanted to come for an audition, and if I paid for my ticket and everything, they would see me. So I did.”

She had three more recalls on that first trip, and was asked to return to the UK twice more before finally securing the role - though those times at least the air fare was paid for.

“By the end of those six auditions, I just wanted an answer,” she says. “I needed to know what was going on with my future, and if I had to move here or not. After the final audition, Michael Grandage knocked on my door five minutes after it and said I had the part.”

Grandage has been a friend and a champion ever since, and when she was in Boeing-Boeing, the pair met to discuss future possibilities. She was back home in Buenos Aires, recording her newly released album Vientos Del Sur - Winds from the South, when he called her again.

“He said he had this gap [in the Donmar’s summer schedule] and did I want to come back and do Piaf?” she recalls. “I couldn’t believe it - it was my dream. I wanted to do it this year, no later. I think sometimes when you have an idea to do something, you can’t wait, or the energy goes.”

By playing Piaf, Roger is coincidentally following in the footsteps of Elaine Paige, who originated the role of Eva Peron on stage and once also played Piaf in the West End. “My next job is to play Elaine Paige live,” Roger confesses, quickly adding, “Don’t tell her!”

For now, however, she is looking forward to taking Piaf to the West End and then heading home. “I left home two years ago, and now that I’ve done this, I have to give them something more there again,” she says. “For me, I’ve been growing up as an artist over here. For them, I went to London and had all this success, so I want them to be able to see me again.

“But I have felt very, very good here. And if there’s a project for me in the future here, I will be here again - I’m sure of it.”

Piaf resumes performances at the Vaudeville Theatre on October 16, prior to an official opening on October 21. To book, call 0844 412 4663 or visit www.piafonstage.com