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Lesley Sharp, Marc Warren and Diana Vickers star in the first major West End revival of Jim Cartwright’s multi award-winning play, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice.
This wonderfully funny, incredibly moving play tells the story of a shy, reclusive girl named Little Voice and her larger than life, out of control mother Mari.
Desperately missing her dead father, Little Voice spends her time locked in her bedroom listening to his old record collection and perfecting astonishing impersonations of famous divas, including Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland and Dusty Springfield.
When Mari starts dating small-time club agent Ray Say, she thinks he’s her last chance for a better life. When Ray Say hears Little Voice sing, he thinks she’s his ticket to the big time. Little Voice just wants a normal life and to be loved.
It is nights like this that make my job both a privilege and a pleasure.
Though it was a big success in the early nineties and was subsequently turned into a film, Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is rarely revived. The reason isn’t hard to find. It demands a young star who can’t just act and sing, but sing like a host of the great divas of popular song — Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, Edith Piaf and Judy Garland among them.
Jane Horrocks firmly established her star credentials in this show. Now it is the turn of 18-year-old Diana Vickers.
Those who have the stomach for talent-show TV at its most gaudy and manipulative will already have heard of her. She wound up in fourth place in The X Factor last year.
Having endured more than my fair share of trial by light entertainment over the years, I have always given the show a miss. But what’s remarkable about encountering Diana Vickers for the first time on stage is that it turns out that she can act as well as sing, and more than hold her own in the company of seasoned professionals.
Cartwright’s play is a rough-cut gem, blessed with filthy jokes, outlandish characters, and moments of both sentimentality and savagery. It has its faults: the author overdoes the vernacular stage poetry, like some word-drunk Dylan Thomas of the Lancashire mill-towns, and there are moments, even in a production whipped along by that great master of popular theatre, Terry Johnson, when the pace flags.
What’s never in doubt, however, is that Little Voice combines a highly original dramatic vision with a heart as big as a house. Vickers plays a quiet, painfully shy girl called Little Voice, whose beloved father died when she was a child, bequeathing her his collection of LPs by female vocalists. They are her only consolation in a life burdened by a boozy, vulgar mother, Mari Hoff, drinking in the last chance saloon, and squeezing herself into a succession of tarty outfits matched with knickers retrieved from the dirty laundry basket as she tries to get herself a man.
She thinks she’s found her man when she meets Ray Say, a small time hustler with dreams of becoming a talent agent. But Ray turns out to be more interested in her withdrawn daughter’s ability to sing like her idols than in Mari.
Lesley Sharp is outstanding as the fearsome Mari, loud, entirely selfish and yelling at her terrified daughter: Are you agoraphobical [sic] because if you are you can get out. But there is an anguish in Sharp’s whirlwind performance that compels pity as well as contempt.
Vickers, clutching her knees to her chest, brings a poignant buttoned-up grief and fear to Little Voice, and is magical when she sings. And there is terrific support from Mark Warren as the odious Ray Say; Rachel Lumberg as Mari’s fat friend who astonishes the house by performing the splits; James Cartwright (son of the playwright) as LV’s shy admirer and Tony Haygarth as a sleazy MC in a hilariously improbable toupee.
Popular theatre doesn’t come much better than this.
