When Christine Bovill takes to the stage to sing and looks at the audience members sitting cabaret-style at little tables with white, starched tablecloths the troubadour now pays closer attention to any errant wine stains. Last summer, during the pandemic, Bovill was invited to perform her acclaimed shows Piaf and Paris at a chateau in the Périgord, deep within rural France. For a week she was alone in the vast home and decided to help her hosts by ironing the tablecloths.
“There were these beautiful white linen cloths over the tables and I had ironed those — which isn’t very showbiz — but I was being put up in this amazing place and I thought I’d help out. It took a whole day.”
Thankfully for Bovill, her return to the Edinburgh Fringe this month will not involve an iron. The singer can instead relax and enjoy a return to the stage that so many actors, dancers and musicians have longed for in lockdown. “The pandemic has reminded me just how much of a live performer I am . . . I performed for the [Glasgow] Jazz Festival without an audience, and it’s so hard as you are generating your own energy.”
Over the past decade Bovill has earned an international reputation as performer of French songs from the 1920s to the 1950s, epitomised by the repertoire of Édith Piaf, la Môme (the Little Sparrow) who became an icon of French resistance during the Second World War. It was an old Piaf record that changed Bovill’s life.
As a 14-year-old in Mollinsburn, near Cumbernauld, Bovill hated school, especially French, and had no plans for her life. Then a family friend who knew of her passion for old records brought her an album by Piaf whose A-side offered the songs in English and B-side in the original French.
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“Graham Greene . . . said that there is a moment in a child’s life when a door opens and lets the future in — and that record was it for me,” she said. “As soon as I started to listen to Édith Piaf in French, the obsession [grew] for the voice, the music, the songs . . . the Paris that existed in those songs. It gave me an identity at 14. I went on to do my Higher French, got a degree in French and became a French teacher, and it all comes back to that friend putting the record on the turntable.”
Bovill has long since left the classroom to travel the world, educating audiences about the beauty of these songs, which she sings in the original language: “You have a three and a half minute song and a three-act play going on at the same time.”
Over the next few weeks Bovill will be among the hundreds, if not thousands, of performers, returning to Edinburgh for the Fringe, which in the past few weeks has expanded rapidly. When tickets first went on sale in early July there were 170 shows but the programme has expanded to almost 700 across 106 venues. In the wake of social distancing rules being relaxed on July 19 more than 300 new shows were announced. While the Fringe officially launches on Friday the following Monday could see the one-metre social distancing rules lifted, which would let venues increase their capacity further, though many venues plan to keep the rule.
Bovill will be performing her show Paris at Edinburgh, which includes Et maintenaint (What Now, My Love?) in which “the character’s relationship is ended and she is looking at life after she had burnt through all the pain and anger and disappointment, and feels nothing any more. The terror of oblivion.”
Then there is her rendition of Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam, a guttural shanty about a sailor’s exploits in port. “On the one hand it is a grotesque tableau of human excess. On the other hand, and at the heart of the song, Brel is really celebrating life in all its caustic exuberance. These are the moments I live for.”
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Paris performed by Christine Bovill is at the Institut Francais, August 10-22; edfringe.com