Opening Night Review by Peter Fitton
“The Rise and Fall of Little Voice” seems to be Farnworth-writer Jim Cartwright’s tribute to Shelagh Delaney’s “A Taste Of Honey”. Blowsy, mutton-dressed-as-lamb mother, Mari, despairs of her misfit daughter, LV, whilst trying to hang on to her fancy man, Ray Say. Wayward parenting certainly looms large and both plays walk a tightrope between the mother’s brash, slatternly lifestyle and the daughter’s desperate need to escape loneliness and neglect. The laughs generated by Mari’s awfulness are counterbalanced by the ache of both her and her victim.
But, whereas Jo in “Honey” is an articulate free-spirit, LV is the ultimate introvert, trapped in her bedroom, listening to LPs and absorbing the talents of Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, Gracie Fields and Marilyn Monroe. Her only friend and interpreter is the tentative Billy, a telephone engineer who pays her innocent visits, like a shy Bolton Romeo, through her bedroom window. A gradual emergence from her shell, then the discovery and exploitation of her singing talents provide the dramatic impetus of the play. Will she or won’t she escape her mother’s shambolic regime and find true love? What loyalties have kids towards their inept parents, when love’s too tough to bear? And what will happen to the chaotic Mari?
Weighty subject matters but Cartwright’s play is a small miracle of black farce, lurid character study and genuine poignancy, all written in a heightened, agile poetic-prose that provokes both wild laughter and empathetic tears.
Phil McCarthy’s fond production majors on showy performances from the extraordinary Jo Lord as motor-mouthed Mari, lurching in and out of sundry tarty costumes and from Colin Smith’s more restrained, seedy Ray, unable to believe his luck in stumbling across such a prodigious, imitative talent as LV’s. Their relationship starts with a boisterously vulgar grapple on the settee, whereas LV’s secret tryst with Billy is a delicate tiptoe on eggshells. Nathan Simpson’s careful, kindly courtship is a marvel of hesitant coaxing, one sensitive character drawing an even more uncertain one out of her chronic shyness. Helen Rose’s LV begins “on the spectrum”, flourishes spectacularly in a knee-jerk cabaret tribute to her heroines of song, then subsides into hurt and recrimination; it’s a dazzling tour-de-force across any number of extreme emotions.
Alison Wood’s Sadie shoulders the brunt of supposed-friend Mari’s caustic jibes with inarticulate forbearance and regular hiccups of “O.K.” but reveals a sudden perkiness on the settee towards Jon Crebbin’s startled Mr. Boo; even his slickly confident compere’s patter hasn’t prepared him for a giddy Sadie. Peter Dignan, playing Billy’s boss, brings a further shade of bewilderment to a household of disconcertingly outsize characters.
Mari’s frowsy tip of a dwelling, with its treacherous electrics and mouldy breakfast goods, is dexterously shoehorned into the confined spaces of the nub-end of the Millgate stage with a detailed and claustrophobic two-tier set. The transformation of this domestic interior into Mr. Boo’s club was not without its difficulties in a first-night glitch but the eventual triumphant drawing of the swagged and shiny curtain received its own round of applause. Lighting and effects (often pyrotechnic!) are particularly effective towards the end, where Mari breaks down amongst the shadows of an emergency torch.
The whole production, from the outset, possessed pace, great cartoon energy and heart. As for the pastiche performances of those great torch singers, with a nifty on-stage band, they are worth the ticket price alone but, whatever your upbringing, the play is bound to send you home with a grateful shudder that it wasn’t as madly challenging as LV’s.