I feel a song coming on

Jane Horrocks saves the annoyingly noisy 'Little Voice' with uncanny impressions of Garland, Dietrich and Monroe

By Charles Taylor

Dec 4, 1998 | You can probably count on the fingers of one hand the actresses and performances that engender the same feeling that Jane Horrocks does in the title role of "Little Voice." Horrocks is keeping company here with Shelley Duvall in "Thieves Like Us," Sissy Spacek in "Carrie," Molly Parker in "Kissed" -- all of those performances that fill you with a mixture of protectiveness and astonishment. There's something tentative, a tad unformed, about these wide-eyed girls: They might be taking in the life around them while perched on a lily pad. And though they're all playing wallflowers, they're about as ordinary as posies blooming on Jupiter. In "Little Voice," adapted by director Mark Herman ("Brassed Off") from Jim Cartwright's play "The Rise and Fall of Little Voice" (in which Horrocks starred in London), Horrocks is working with a lot less than those other actresses. Little Voice, "LV" as she's known, has been so damaged by her father's death and by being forced to live with her blowsy, boozing, man-hungry mother that she barely speaks. The only way she can express herself is by endlessly listening to her dead father's beloved records. He adored female vocalists -- Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe -- and LV has listened to his discs so obsessively that she can do note-perfect imitations of them. They've become her voice.

Cartwright nicked the idea of a character who can express herself only through popular songs from Dennis Potter's "Pennies from Heaven." And it might not have mattered so much that LV is less a character than a conceit if Cartwright had chosen to do the whole play in that expressionist style. But he's pilfered from Shelagh Delaney, too. The relationship between LV and her mother, Mari, is a coarse, crass rewrite of the mother-daughter scenes in "A Taste of Honey," and Cartwright's third-hand kitchen-sink realism cancels out the fairy-tale quality he tries for elsewhere. It's a play of glaringly obvious symbolism and even more obvious foreshadowing. And for a playwright who's chosen one of life's outsiders for his heroine, Cartwright has a cheap view of humanity; almost all the characters, even the victimized ones, eventually give in to their worst impulses, and he presents those moments smugly, as if to say, "I knew it all along."

Herman hasn't thought through any of these contradictions. A stray moment of three people standing in a moonlit street listening to LV channeling the voice of Garland suggests how the material might be done simply and affectingly. But he's made the usual stupid mistake that occurs when plays are transferred to the screen. Assuming that a stage play can't be "cinematic" (he says as much in the movie's press material), Herman falls back on the typical nonsense of opening the play up, racing the camera hither and thither -- that is, when he's not jamming it down his actors' tonsils.