About the Play:
Winner of the 1992
Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and 1993 Olivier Award for
Best Comedy
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is a full-length dramatic
comedy by Jim Cartwright. This wistful tale centers on a
shy, working-class English girl with the extraordinary ability to
mimic the pop singers from her dead father's record collection. She may be
a meal ticket for a low-rent agent, even as the girl's abusive mother
hopes to land the agent as a husband. Blown fuses, real and
metaphorical, punctuate the action with flashes of pent up energy in
this acclaimed play.
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice
tells the story of Little Voice (LV), a painfully shy, diminutive
girl who frequently plunges the dilapidated house she shares
with her alcoholic mother into darkness by playing her dead father's
records at a volume matched only by the soulful power of her vocal
impressions. LV has a hidden talent: she has perfected faultless
impersonations of the greatest divas, from Judy Garland to
Barbra Streisand. She hides in her room, crooning and dreaming of love, while her
dishevelled mother mistakes a seedy agent's interest as affection
rather than enthusiasm for the gold mine buried in her daughter's
throat.
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is an engaging fairy tale of despair, love and finally
hope as LV finds a voice of her own.
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice was first performed at
the Royal National Theatre in 1992 and at The Aldwych Theatre in
London’s West End, later that year. The production was nominated
for six Olivier Awards, was winner of The Evening Standard Award for
Best Comedy of the Year in 1992 and the Laurence Olivier Award for
Best Comedy in 1993. It opened on Broadway in 1995 in a production
that transferred from Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 1994.
Cast: 3 female, 3 male
What people say:
"Entertainment at its best....
The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is a cracker,
original, hilarious and hauntingly sad." — The Daily
Telegraph
"Utterly beguiling."
— Daily Mail
"We leave singing, our
happiness fired by a glowing mixture of grit and innocence, magic,
irony and truth." — What's On
"Extraordinary."
— The Daily Express
"Like everything Cartwright
writes, Little Voice is playful, magical and terrifying, a view of
the world from an unexpected angle, perpetrated by an imagination
that notices the dust in the grooves of old records and finds poetry
in garish, swanky clothes or the glitterball of a rowdy northern
club." — The Sunday Times
"A northern showbiz fairytale,
a backstreet Cinderella story, with a built-in kick." —
The Guardian
About the Playwright:
Jim Cartwright is among Britain's best dramatists. His
plays are consistently performed around the world, where they have
won numerous awards, and been translated into 30 languages. He
trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
However, it is as a playwright that he has really made his mark. His
very first play, Road, won a number of awards before being
adapted for TV and broadcast by the BBC. He is probably best known
for his play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice.