British writer Jim Cartwright was inspired to pen his 1992 play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice as a star vehicle for a young Jane Horrocks when she was appearing in his play Road. She’s an electrifying actor, but it was the vocal impersonations of Judy Garland and Ethel Merman she did as a warm-up that really caught Cartwright’s attention.
The resulting play – packed with obligatory songs – tells the story of Little Voice, or LV (Geraldine Hakewill), a young girl living in a Northern British town with her drunk cyclone of a mother, Mari Hoff (Caroline O’Connor). LV is painfully shy, to say the least, and spends her days locked away in her upstairs room singing along to the records of famous divas that were her father’s pride and joy. Downstairs, Mari is looking for love, and she thinks she’s found it when thrifter and down-on-his-luck talent agent Ray Say (Joseph Del Re) starts showing interest. But it soon turns out he’s more interested in what LV can do for him than in anything Mari has to offer.
It’s a story about a young woman finding her own voice, but it’s not really complex or nuanced enough to stand up as a genuinely great play in 2019. Significantly better plays about this very subject – and the way that ageing, downtrodden women like Mari are passed over – have been written in the years since. Although LV and Mari might be great roles for actors, they’re not really fully fleshed women; they’re more like the two sides of a coin that Cartwright needed to make an overly simplistic dramatic point.
If the play is to work, it needs serious star power. The 1998 film version scored Brenda Blethyn an Oscar nomination for Mari and Horrocks a Golden Globe nomination, and both became synonymous with those roles. This local version by Darlinghurst Theatre Company is blessed with Australian musical theatre star Caroline O’Connor, fresh from originating the role of Lily in Anastasia on Broadway, and TV and theatre star Geraldine Hakewill. But under Shaun Rennie’s direction – which ambitiously attempts to cut to heart of these women’s internal lives and tragedies – neither shines quite as brightly as you might hope.
O’Connor has all of Mari’s desperate energy and ferocity, and is heartbreaking in her quieter moments; particularly when she opens up to LV and when she’s finally torn down by Ray. It all comes from a place of truth and is technically stunning – the voice, the physicality, the arc – but it’s a performance that feels too big for the 200-seat Eternity Playhouse. Mari is larger-than-life, but you can sense O’Connor’s foot pushing on the accelerator. It would be fine if it were Mari’s foot, given her desperate trajectory, but you don’t want to necessarily feel an actor pushing this hard.
Hakewill is a strong match and manages to make her character’s relative smallness and severe anxiety work. It’s in the singing that she really comes alive, and Hakewill is mostly very well equipped for those vocal transformations. It’s just a shame that her Judy Garland – the magnificent sound that Ray Say hears that inspires him to stake his career on her – is not entirely on point.
Joseph Del Re does decent work as Ray, but his casting is a misstep. He seems too young and not even close to the washed-up man on the page. Kip Chapman camps it up as Lou Boo, a nightclub MC, and Charles Wu is perfectly sweet as the young man who falls for LV. Bishanyia Vincent puts her comedic skills to strong use as Mari’s hapless friend Sadie, but the direction, her performance and costuming all underline her uselessness a little too obviously.
Isabel Hudson’s production design is striking and non-naturalistic, with LV’s bedroom realised as a small, secluded sanctuary, elevated on a platform, high above the chaos. Mari’s house is realised as a dark and dank space, covered in treacherous electrical cables, conjuring up images of cheap appliances trying to cope with a difficult life. The whole thing feels a little overstated – though it’s elevated by Trent Suidgeest’s lighting – as do the costumes. We’re meant to understand that the characters have bad taste, but, unless we’re to think they’re complete idiots, it’s difficult to believe these characters would make quite so heinous fashion choices.
Rennie’s production ends with Milck’s ‘Quiet’, a song that was dubbed the anthem of the 2017 Women’s March. It’s moving but feels out of step with everything we’re led to believe about LV and her obsession with classic divas – and certainly a bit of a stretch to try to connect this play to recent social movements concerning women's rights. In fact, having her sing something quite so contemporary almost undermines the fact that it’s those classics that have given LV a voice in her darkest hour. It just doesn’t make sense that she’s ready to take on an entirely new expression and stake her claim at this point.
As with much in this production, the writing doesn’t quite support what the Australian creative team wants to do in this moment. The musical choice pulls against what Cartwright’s play is getting at rather than broadening it out. It’s an ambitious treatment of this text, but not a wholly satisfying one.