The Rise and Fall of Little Voice

As anyone who watched her in front of Simon Cowell and Co knows, there's nothing little about Diana Vickers's voice. Vickers gives a strong vocal performance as reluctant Lancashire heroine Little Voice, the agonisingly shy tenement songbird who can conjure the voices of Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey and Edith Piaf from her gramophone of a gullet. Terry Johnson's revival of the play that Jim Cartwright wrote for Jane Horrocks has plenty of talent - not least Lesley Sharp, stripped of her usual sensitivity as LV's vicious old slapper of a mother. But this 'Little Voice' remake lacks the X-factor: that magical, mysterious quality which gives you a pang in your heart, a tingle in your spine and tears in your beer.

It's LV's mini-skirted mother, Mari, who dominates Cartwright's script and provides most of its slang-poetic grot and sparkle: the self-obsessed speeches that she sprays over her silent daughter like last night's vomit are a bit much, but they make their mark in Sharp's manic and bitter performance. Vickers can't muster a silent intensity to match Sharp's motormouth. And when LV karate kicks her seedy manager (Marc Warren) in the gob, or shimmies her way enjoyably through her showgirl medley onstage at the local talent club, she looks as hard as nail polish. At least her strangulated scream of a voice is believable as a pent-up response to Mari.

And the gentle scenes with her spoddy young BT Romeo, who elevates himself to her window on his telephone engineer's crane, are touching and impressively designed. But there are two very different dramatic flightpaths here. The young star who is draped in wings of light to sing the show's new finale (a bland triumphalist anthem by Mark Owen) is rising, literally, to the roof. But she's leaving her character - who finds her own voice by refusing to be pimped in onstage talent shows - and the ravaged wreck of her gutter-bound mother far, far below. Johnson's production of Cartwright's grim Northern fairy tale has a memorable tart in Lesley Sharp, but it has no heart because it never makes itself vulnerable. This is a 'Little Voice' with oodles of showbiz
but not enough soul.