Dukes, Lancaster
Jim Cartwright's 1992 comedy has matured into an enjoyable period piece – just how much so becomes apparent in the first scene when Mari, a noisy northern housewife, is beside herself with excitement over the acquisition of a new phone. It takes two engineers to install it and plug it into the wall.
It's a minor miracle that the play has had any kind of continued production history at all, having specifically been tailored to expose Jane Horrocks's uncanny ability to impersonate the great popular divas from Gracie Fields to Judy Garland. Yet it was successfully revived in the West End with X-Factor contestant Diana Vickers; and here it is the remarkable Rebecca Hutchinson who proves capable of switching from Bassey to Piaf and back again in a single breath.
Cartwright's drama has an archetypal quality – it's essentially the Tale of the Ugly Duckling in reverse – and might be said to have invented its own genre of glittery northern realism. Director Amy Leach points out that it's hard to conceive of Shameless or The Royle Family without it; though Cartwright's language remains one of a kind. When Eithne Browne's Mari rhapsodises over a "real pronto lip-lapping snog", it's hard not to picture exactly what she means. The downside of such loquacity is that it leaves little room for subtext. It's a good job Hutchinson's Little Voice and Sue McCormick's amiable, roly-poly Sadie are practically mute or else the play would go on all night. Leach's production is long enough, but the young, Bolton-born director has had an impressive run at the Dukes, suggesting that hers is another significant little voice on the rise.