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The passionate first-night performance by an unknown actress from Argentina had the critics raving this week. Evita, says Elena Roger, is a role that she was born to play.
A virtual unknown on Wednesday, Argentine actress Elena Roger woke late yesterday morning to find herself the toast of London. The capital's critics, often cool in the face of both musicals and imported talent, fell over themselves to praise the diminutive 31- year-old's performance as her country's most controversial icon, Eva Peron, in the Pounds 3.5 million revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's and Tim Rice's Evita. She pulls off a startling transformation from dowdy brunette to the glamorous blonde embodiment of her country's hopes.
The Evening Standard's Nicholas de Jongh described her as "all vulnerability and cunning, with enough sex appeal and raw erotic energy to snare half a government", while Charles Spencer in Corbis the Telegraph praised her "tremendous presence ... wonderfully expressive mouth and eyes ... [and] star quality". For Benedict Nightingale in The Times, Roger was, simply, "a revelation".
Sitting in her dressing room the day after opening night, with her dyed Titian hair, pipecleaner frame, and with no makeup on her wide mouth and enormous blue eyes, Roger looks more like a teenage rock chick than a West End star.
She seems remarkably calm.
"Today I am relaxed," she says. "I was so excited yesterday before the show, with a lot of energy, because I was waiting for this moment for so long. Now I feel, ah, it is done." There was, she concedes, a minor wobble as she was putting on Evita's makeup. "I thought, 'How strange it is that I am here in London, so far from Buenos Aires, and that I am doing this,'" she says. "I realised it was a big deal."
Once out on stage, though, the enthusiasm bore her up.
"It was a very 'hot' audience," she says.
"Audiences in Argentina are 'hot', they scream and are very expressive.
Last night was not so different. All the time, they were with us, not sleeping or dreaming of other things." Indeed, they gave her a rapturous ovation. Elated but exhausted, she went on to the after- show party and "didn't stop talking to journalists and all the people in the show", until, leaving at 1.30am, she found to her disgust that the West End was pretty much dead. "You don't have much nightlife here," she says, unleashing a raucous peal of disdainful Latin laughter. "That is terrible for us!"
Joking aside, Roger takes the musical, and its treatment of Eva Peron very seriously.
Born dirt-poor Eva Duarte in 1919, Evita became an actress and was alleged by her detractors to have slept her way to political influence.
After helping her Hitler-admiring husband, General Juan Peron, to win the presidential election in 1946, she set about championing Argentina's impoverished "descamisados" [shirtless ones] and empowering its women, winning them the vote in 1947.
"She fought so hard for something important when a woman's rights didn't really exist," says Roger, whose own aunt was one of those who called Evita a whore but ended up adoring her. Although Evita died of cancer aged 33 in 1952, she still enjoys an iconic status in Argentina similar to Princess Diana's.
"A lot of people love her and a lot of people hate her," says Roger. With paternal grandparents who were Peronists from the south, and Italian socialist grandparents who had fled Mussolini, Roger says that "all my life I heard people speak about the Perons. When I was born, politics in Argentina really began to fall down, with the military [dictatorship] period. It was a terrible time because a lot of people disappeared - many more than in the Peron epoch."
The subsequent restitution of democracy, for all its strife between "Peronistas" and "radicales", would not have been possible without the Perons' empowering of the underclass, she suggests: "This was the fight of the people - the pueblo."
Roger was four when Evita opened in London, starring Elaine Paige. "I never saw the original," she says, "but someone told me how they portrayed Eva as a very bad woman, very despotic."
Unsurprisingly, the show was condemned and never staged in her homeland ("it was too close, too soon after Peron's death [in 1974]"), although there appears to be a thriving industry in home- grown Peron musicals and films there. When Michael Grandage, director of the current revival, assured her that his production would be more tempered, she read every book, and watched every film and documentary on the woman she could find. Oh, and the Alan Parker film of the musical starring Madonna.
"I just watched it once, and I thought it was good," says Roger, but she denies that it influenced her. "Maybe at first there was the odd movement that sticks in your head, but once I started working with Michael on the meaning of the whole thing, our work was so specific and clear there was never any danger of me being like Madonna." (She adds, tactfully, that "I like Madonna's work, and I think her career is very impressive. She works so hard.") Roger's own approach to Eva has been to "bring a little humanity to the role. To show how strong she was. How she was inside, her thoughts about the life, why she didn't have children, her feeling about helping people.
Maybe there were bad things about her too, but there is more to her than just that. She is very complex."
As well as playing a complex woman and a national icon, it was also the chance to portray a whole life, from childhood to death. "I am 31 and she died when she was 33, so I recognise all the periods of her life.
She is young first, then she has problems with men as a young woman, then begins to have political thoughts ..."
Roger laughs off suggestions that she has been wronged, like Evita, by men ("I have had my heart disappointed, but I try not to have the suffering all the time on my back") but claims she can empathise with the character's early death. "I have had a lot of illness with people in my family," she says. "I remember how the light disappears from them, and I understand how it feels when this happens."
It would be wrong to equate Elena Roger's life with Evita's, as critics sought to do with Madonna. Roger's father distantly descended from 19th-century Welsh immigrants to Patagonia and now retired because of a severe stroke triggered by Argentina's economic slump in 2002 - was a salesman in the rubber industry, her mother a housewife. The family were not political and they also weren' t poor, although such is Argentina's chaotic economy that Roger says her father had to work hard to educate her and her brother Sergio, a musical engineer, and her sister Amalia, an Italian teacher.
Elena, the youngest, fell in love with music while listening to her grandmother's Italian opera records, and trained in dance and singing from the age of 15. "I wasn't a natural but I had the feeling inside me," she says.
From her first role in a musical about the Hunchback of Notre Dame, she has never been out of work, and has starred in the Buenos Aires productions of Les Misérables and Saturday Night Fever.
She also created a show about the Italian singer Mina, whose records her grandmother used to play, and staged it at Luna Park, the amphitheatre where Peron and Evita first met.
It was a DVD of this performance which Roger sent to Andrew Lloyd Webber, then preparing to revive Evita, to persuade him she could sing in another language.
Over the course of three auditions she impressed the composer by not trying to impersonate Madonna, Elaine Paige, or Broadway's Evita, Patti LuPone.
Clearly, the Mina musical was a lucky show: it was there that she met Javier, a 30-year-old composer, arranger and musician who is now her boyfriend of two years.
"The first month I was here it was very hard being alone," says Roger, "but he is here now for as long as he can be. We are staying on the South Bank, by the river, which is lovely."
Javier and her brother and sister nobly forsook the Argentina-Holland match to watch Elena's triumph, and her parents will visit later in the yearlong run of Evita. I ask Roger if it's true that she and Javier plan to marry after that year is up, before the potential transfer of Evita to Broadway. "Marry? No, I don't think so. We are good the way we are," she says smartly, as if to remind me how Eva Peron changed things for Argentine women.
The couple have talked about having children, "but we are young, and we have a lot of things to do. I like to take everything step by step, and right now I need to enjoy my year in London."
Elena Roger has been in London twice before, once on a wide- eyed, whistlestop European tour with her sister eight years ago, and once in 2003 on a tour of Tango por Dos. This time, though, the city has taken her to its bosom, and the affection is mutual. Up to a point, at least. "I love the energy of London, the stories of the buildings, the little streets and the history, and how cosmopolitan it is now, with people from everywhere," she says. "But you really do need some nightlife!"
© Associated Newspapers Ltd.
The above article was also published in the Scotsman on 26 June 2006.
