A timid sparrow who’s longing to soar
We’ve just had Edward and Freddie Fox as father and son in An Ideal Husband, so now here’s a mother and daughter in Jim Cartwright’s tale of a drunken mum and her boyfriend who exploit a girl’s gift for singing like the divas.
Rafaella Hutchinson is Lv — ‘Little voice’ — nicknamed for her shyness. She is grieving for her dead father, tending his precious vinyl record collection and channelling the pain and yearning of the songs.
When she sings The Man That Got Away, hairs rise on your neck. But face to face with the boorish agent (Kevin McMonagle, splendid in a bad brown suit), she is a terrified, damaged rabbit, shoved at a club microphone in an exploded- custard frock, abused until she erupts.
Hutchinson has a fine voice and air of inward sorrow, but it must be admitted that if anyone carries the show it is her mum. Sally George, as Mari, is a crazy, slaggy, high-voltage menace. She enters with a shriek, lurches round the set and summons her lover with ‘Coom on, let’s roll around!’
She’s a victim, too: stuck in a dead-end job, plaything of careless men, frustratedly uncomprehending of her quiet late husband, and afflicted by so much destructive unfocused energy that nowadays she’d be on Ritalin. But she is also a classic monster. With Jane Horrocks as Lv, this became a hit film with its themes of showbiz, manipulation and family misery. But in the Park’s small space, as the crackling house wiring becomes tacky club lights, what you feel more intimately is the howling emotional need for beauty.
Even slobby Sadie the neighbour (Jamie-Rose Monk) senses it, once she hears Lv singing alone.
Touchingly, the big woman manages to get two real, fat tears rolling down her cheeks.
Sweet young Billy, the telephone engineer ( Linford Johnson), finds his beauty in light . . . the Blackpool Illuminations.
In the final moments, amid the ashes, song and light come together to take Lv over the rainbow. Lovely.