Twelve years after its Cottesloe premiere, Jim Cartwright's feelgood fairytale looks a little flimsier than it once did. You admire the saltiness of Cartwright's dialogue while yearning for the abrasiveness of Road, with its masterly portrait of our scarred industrial wasteland.
This play feeds off two icons from 50s drama: the raucous, boozy mum from A Taste of Honey and the inarticulate heroine who finds her voice from Wesker's Roots. But Cartwright lends his mother-figure, Mari Hoff, a gabbiness that leads her to announce "there's a circus parade passing over me paps". And her daughter, Little Voice, is a Cinderella-like waif who sheds her impressions of showbiz divas to find her own pure, unadulterated tone.
Cartwright occasionally touches on real emotional issues: in particular Mari's rancorous jealousy at the close bond between her daughter and her late, implicitly camp husband united by their passion for cabaret queens. But Cartwright all too often papers over the pain with sentimental gestures such as the heroine's rescue by a phone engineer. And while Emma Lowndes makes a touching Little Voice, gamely imitating Garland, Piaf, Dietrich and Merman in a tacky northern club, you never feel she is possessed by vocal demons as you did with Jane Horrocks in the original.
The real revelation is Denise Welch, familiar from TV soaps, as Mari. Instead of a witch she gives us a woman on the edge of desperation who knows she is shagging in the last-chance saloon and who has felt excluded by her family: when at the last she surveys her gutted house - cleverly evoked in Liz Ascroft's exploding design - and says "my soul is leaking over the floor" Welch makes you feel for this desolate wreck. Sarah Frankcom's production boasts lively support from David Hounslow as a seedy agent and Roy Barraclough as a garishly bewigged club owner. But the chief pleasure of the evening lies in watching Welch turn a cartoon slattern into a Boltonian Blanche Dubois.
· Until February 21. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
