Little Voice Read what the Press are saying about Little Voice

Charles Spencer

Popular Theatre at its heartfelt best

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... 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 But Ray turns out to be more interested in her withdrawn daughter’s ability to sing like her idols than in Mari.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.

Belting out a great show

It was a wonder the buses on The Strand did not screech to a halt when the sound waves thundered out of the Vaudeville Theatre.

The Howitzer tones of Judy Garland singing Get Happy, the atomic register of Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger and even the trembling tonsils of Edith Piaf wailing Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien filled the air.

They were all wrapped in the slender form of Diana Vickers, the 18-year-old X-factor discovery, who is the new Little Voice in Jim Cartwright’s moving 1992 play with music.

She plays the reclusive north country LV who hides in her bedroom endlessly playing old LP records of her great vocal heroines. Then astonishingly she reveals a brilliant talent to imitate them, note and tone perfect.

Diana Vickers’ vocal dexterity is remarkable – one moment, for instance, she is Marilyn Monroe whispering I Wanna Be Loved By You, the next she’s suddenly Our Cilla wondering What It’s All About, Alfie.

After LV is discovered by talent agent Ray Say (Marc Warren’s performance cleverly combines the sly and the sleazy), she takes the local working men’s club by storm. Stardom beckons – but LV is horrified and breaks down. Much of her pent-up fury is directed at her grotesque mother Mari, a man-consuming slag of a woman.

And although Diana Vickers is triumphant as LV it is Lesley Sharp who must take the dramatic plaudits as the increasingly raddled, drunken and foul-mouthed woman who left her morality up against a wall.

With daunting power Leslie Sharp gives us a nightmare vision of motherhood – dressed in tarty clothes 20 years too young for her and more interested in gin than gentleness. It is a memorable performance.

James Cartwright is touchingly impressive as the nerdish, hesitant Billy, obsessed with lighting and in love with LV.

Rachel Lumberg is quite superb as the obese neighbour Sadie, who is often the cruel butt of Mari’s jokes. (“Your armpits smell of cat food again.”)

And Tony Haygarth, as Mr Boo, captures perfectly the failed jokiness of a northern club compere.

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