Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Four stars
It’s the quiet ones you have to watch in Jim
Cartwright’s scabrous treatise on grief and finding salvation through song,
revived here by Gemma Fairlie as the second show of Pitlochry Festival
Theatre’s summer season. At the start, at least, LV, the painfully shy young
woman that gives the play its title, is all but ignored amidst the clamour caused
by her drunken mother and the big-talking men she brings back to a house with
dangerously shonky wiring.
While LV stays silent, she loses herself in the
records once owned by her now dead dad. Shirley Bassey, Judy Garland and Edith
Piaf were his favourites, camp icons all, and when LV sings, it’s as if she’s
channelling the spirit of both them and him. It’s local lothario Ray Say and
sleazy club compere Mr Boo who have stars in their eyes, however, as LV runs
terrified from the spotlight.
Written and set in a pre-internet and pre-reality TV
talent show age, Cartwright’s play is a potty-mouthed riot. While a rites of
passage for LV and telephone engineer Billy, who offers her light in every way,
it’s a self-destructive screaming match of failed ambition for everybody else. With
each scene segued by a slow-motion lurch into the next, the play itself
dove-tails between sit-com, rom-com and soap opera.
As LV’s mother Mari Hoff, Deirdre Davis is a ravaged
explosion of back-street disappointment with a crow’s nest bouffant. Carl
Patrick and Alan Steele cut a similarly grotesque dash as Ray and Mr Boo, with
Irene Myrtle-Forrester’s neighbour Sadie an amusingly silent witness. If life
is a cabaret, only Laura Costello’s radiant LV and Isaac Stanmore’s Billy have
a hope here, and when LV shines enough to finds her own voice, it’s electric.
The Herald, June 11th 2018
ends
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