Diana Vickers is a fine new Little Voice in a big role

Soaring: Diana Vickers has presence and vocal charisma in the title role
10 April 2012

Jim Cartwright’s play, first staged at the National in 1992, is constructed around a virtuoso performance. At its centre is LV, a painfully shy teenager who seeks solace in her dead father’s record collection while her embarrassingly lively mother Mari seeks it in the arms of men.

LV’s secret is that she can exquisitely impersonate the singers her father cherished. Mari belittles LV’s gift, yet when it comes to the attention of her new squeeze, small-time impresario Ray Say, he sees an opportunity too juicy to pass up.

What follows is broadly predictable: The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is amusing, affecting and decidedly old-fashioned. Now and then it rambles, particularly when LV’s admirer Billy is to the fore, and there are some undeniably saccharine touches. But it has emotional marrow as well as passages of spirited horseplay and Terry Johnson’s revival accentuates its pathos and hilarity.

Lesley Sharp (the lugubriously business-like Louise in Mike Leigh’s Naked), revels in Mari’s chaos and brassy excess. It’s a brilliantly uninhibited performance, especially relishable when Mari is vamping it up to excite her beau.

She inhabits every nook of Lez Brotherston’s lovingly detailed design, abetted by her quietly shambolic friend Sadie (Rachel Lumberg, a delight). Hers is the kind of house where there’s gin in the fridge door — and inside a beanbag.
This doesn’t unsettle Marc Warren’s Ray, a sort of urban gunslinger who could be a refugee from Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights. Warren is poised and creepy; he lacks only a redeeming hint of vulnerability.

The title role is the key. Created for Jane Horrocks, it belongs here to Diana Vickers, previously known for being a semi-finalist in ITV’s The X Factor. While Vickers’s acting may not have great range, it’s winsome. And when she sings she soars.

The most thrilling sequence comes when she slips from Dusty Springfield into Marilyn Monroe, and then dashes through Judy Garland, Marianne Faithfull, Julie Andrews, Shirley Bassey and Edith Piaf. She has presence and vocal charisma, and only when she switches to her own voice, performing a new song by Mark Owen, does she seem less than radiantly polished.

Though the title suggests tragic inflections, this is a feelgood play, and Terry Johnson’s production confidently hits the top notes.
Until 30 January 2010
(020 7432 4220).

The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice
Vaudeville Theatre
Strand, WC2R 0NH

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