All I Want is One Night – Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Jessica Walker in All I Want is One Night at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. Picture: Jonathan Keenan

All I Want is One Night at the Royal Exchange, Manchester.

Rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Suzy Solidor – chances are you won’t know the name but you’d probably recognise the face. Solidor was one of the most celebrated Parisian nightclub chanteuses of the 1930s and 40s, but is better known now as being “the most painted woman in the world”, immortalised in portrait form many times over by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Francis Bacon.

Solidor packed a lot into her 82 years – openly bisexual, championed by Allied and Nazi forces alike, before she was prosecuted for collusion and, in her final years, retreated in penury to open an antiques shop filled with her own possessions on the Côte d’Azur – and Jessica Walker’s biographical play-come-cabaret tribute show makes a decent fist of packing the most piquant parts of her life into its slim 75-minute running time.

But the show’s real strength – nimbly orchestrated by director, and Royal Exchange Theatre artistic director, Sarah Frankcom – is in transporting its audience to the subterranean world of nightspots that were Solidor’s playground.

We start off in that Riviera antiques shop, where Solidor – now a cross-dressing old soak who insists her lusted after housemaid calls her The Admiral – is awaiting an artist commissioned to paint her 225th portrait. To achieve this, the audience is huddled – somewhat awkwardly – around a staircase in the depths of the Exchange Theatre, before being ushered back in time upstairs to the much more comfortable oak-panelled environs of the Great Hall. The latter is decked out effectively by designer Amanda Stoodley to resemble Solidor’s feted La Vie Parisienne nightclub.

Much of this transportative effect is also down to Walker herself, who portrays Solidor as an alluring mix of self-assured master of ceremonies and smart commercial operator and, privately, as a petulant prima donna who measures her happiness in fan adoration. The biographical details are artfully dotted throughout the show, with Rachel Austin and Alexandra Mathie playing an ably sketched array of lovers, artists and significant others.

The play’s biggest drawback is its songs – there aren’t enough of them. And also, with Solidor’s stock in trade being “sexy, sea-faring” numbers, there isn’t much in the way of variety. Walker is a characterful singer and rises to the challenge of some Edith Piaf-like contralto flourishes. But the songs come in two flavours – the bawdily suggestive, like ‘Les Filles de Saint-Marlo’, or heart-on-sleeve sentimental, like the touching ‘La Belle Pirate’, sung in tribute to her absent father – without much in-between.

It doesn’t delve too deeply beneath the surface – but then Solidor’s own life’s work was an exercise in artifice – and there’s definitely scope for development, but as far as it goes, Walker’s bittersweet sojourn is an enjoyably immersive experience.

Chris Bartlett