The documented celebrity encounter is fairly ubiquitous these days, thanks to Instagram et al. By contrast, ‘Songs for Nobodies’ – making its West End debut after a run at Wilton’s Music Hall last year – delves into the effect of meeting famous people in a pre-internet era. In doing so, it finds a touchingly affecting space somewhere between fabricated folklore and fact.
What this show isn’t, is a straightforward revue. Written by Joanna Murray-Smith and directed by Simon Phillips, it does, to be sure, incorporate the standards of some iconic twentieth-century female singers: Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday and Maria Callas. But what lifts it is how their music is used. Their songs are the pulse and rhythm of a series of imagined encounters.
Bernadette Robinson has starred in ‘Song for Nobodies’ since it first premiered in Australia several years ago. She transforms herself into characters ranging from a broken-hearted lavatory attendant who randomly meets Judy Garland in a hotel bathroom to a librarian living outside Nottingham whose Belgian father was liberated from a German prison camp by Edith Piaf.
These are the ‘nobodies’ of the title, but, of course, that’s not how they come across. There’s a well-sketched vividness to each one. Murray-Smith mines a rich seam of longing, humour and quiet frustration to conjure the alchemic effect these women’s encounters with their musical idols have on their lives, from right there in the moment to their future choices.
And, thankfully, this isn’t a show full of celebrities dispensing unfeasible words of wisdom; sometimes, as with Piaf, we don’t even hear them speak directly. We get some biographical nuggets, but this is more Carnegie-Hall-adjacent if you will. They exist somewhere between their life and music, with the telling of each vignette shifting in form and style depending on the star.
This adds up to a tightly constructed 90 minutes that, in spite of its episodic nature, never feels too rote. Perhaps necessarily, it sometimes only skims the surface of its characters and occasionally pushes the whimsy a little hard. But there’s still room for some edge: the privileged ‘nobody’ from the New York Times, sent to interview Billie Holliday, has far less to complain about than her interviewee has had to overcome.
Phillips rightly keeps the staging simple, focused on Greg Arrowsmith’s skilful musical direction and Robinson’s pretty extraordinary performance. She demonstrates huge versatility as she moves between characters while bringing as much personality and distinctiveness to the songs themselves. There’s room for heartbreak and hope as she lifts them from the page.