Janis

Born 1943, died 1970. Age 27. Pioneering female singer in the testosterone-fuelled world of sixties rock. Fatal casualty of that same world. That was Janis Joplin. Her legacy is still celebrated and Nicola Haydn’s one-woman show gives a fascinating if lurid insight into the private and public personas that created a legend.

Plain, dumpy, acne-scarred, insecure, Joplin was an unlikely star. On the eve of her death from an overdose in an LA hotel, she describes her escape from Port Arthur Texas and wild years in San Francisco, before moving on to front Big Brother and the Holding Company, where she found fame and more, thanks to vigorous heroin use by band members. In fact, all her adult life, Joplin would take any substance on offer – the more illicit the better – and seemingly ball anyone who took her fancy.

Alternately dippy and hardnosed, Joplin reveals how her trademark traits, born out of rebellion against the tedium of the small town values she grew up with, became her undoing as she evolved into a full-time junkie. While Haydn’s bubbly script could find more light and shade in what amounts to a straight-forward biopic format, she shines as the troubled rock diva.

Wearing a feather boa a la Pearl – Joplin’s posthumous best-selling album – in both speech and song, Haydn nails that boozy, deliciously rasping voice and infectious cackle. No mere mimic, she captures Joplin’s edgy confidence, in the process allowing us to share some of that magical charisma.