The Rise and Fall of Little Voice

Published Friday 18 April 2008 at 11:35 by Thom Dibdin

Transported and transformed, this new production of Jim Cartwright’s musical uses a west of Scotland setting to provide a vehicle for the comic talents Elaine C Smith. As such, it is a great success. Smith is hilarious as Mari Hoff, whose agoraphobic daughter, Little Voice, has a talent for mimicking the singing voices of great divas of the past.

Smith extracts maximum humour from every aspect of her performance. Physically, she pours herself into already skin-tight and revealing eighties outfits that are now several sizes too small for her voluptuous frame. Verbally, she ad-libs her way through the script, totally in her element as her drunken man-eating widow lunges wildly at Andy Gray’s deliciously sleazy second-rate agent, Ray Say.

Yet, having created the wild and wacky victim, with strong support from Carole Anders as her dim and put-upon neighbour Sadie, Smith does not find it in herself to examine Mari’s darker side as the perpetrator of her daughter’s problems. Only Gray provides this darkness, in Ray Say’s exploitation of mother and daughter.

This sense of a theatrically lopsided production is exacerbated by Debbie Saloman. While her voice is equal to the vocal requirements of the role of Little Voice, she lacks any theatrical depth. Nor is she helped by Jim Webster-Stewart’s bland Billy.

Peter Kelly is an amiable Mr Boo, the compere in the club where Little Voice sings. Annette Gillies’ set is clear and robust - although quite which era it, or the production, is supposed to be set in is ambiguous.