Janis Joplin: Full Tilt

Janis Joplin, as director Cora Bissett has cannily realised, is a figure who seems to belong in the theatre. This was a woman who “prepared real hard at being spontaneous”, who invented fearless onstage alter-ego “Pearl”, who had to keep performing because if the mask slipped there might turn out to be nothing underneath.

It’s apt, then, that Angela Darcy is a performer through and through, uncannily animating Joplin in this tribute to her final days. Her “Pearl” sways, stomps and sings with raw, wounded passion, while Janis, the shadow of her onstage presence, swigs Southern Comfort and looks dismally in the mirror. Darcy is relentlessly intense in the central role, as dark one moment as she is shimmering the next. Her Joplin is one of undiluted extremes.

There’s a danger, as with all rock biographies, of romanticising the giddy swirl of drink, drugs and premature death that has become enshrined in pop cultural mythology. Peter Arnott’s script steers clear of this for the most part, drawing attention instead to the depths of Joplin’s loneliness, but there is nonetheless something intoxicating about the singer’s shambolic and ultimately destructive personality.

Much of this is down to the blistering central performance, which transforms theatre auditorium into euphoric gig. No doubt about it, this is Darcy’s show. As a result, it can feel like an experience that has been tailored around her extraordinary talent rather than one that is driven by its subject. But she does put on one hell of a show.