Little Voice’s mother is an absolute minger. She is Yorkshire’s biggest slagheap, a loud, drunken blonde who might be described by the Viz Profanisaurus as a “golden deceiver”: looks good from behind but from the front she’s a dog. Or perhaps a “Monet”: nice from a distance, but up close a right mess. She could well be a “4x4”, as well: four children by four different fathers. Unfortunately, nothing in Little Voice is nearly as funny as the Viz Profanisaurus. It lasts for almost three tortuous hours, and hardly anything happens.

Little Voice is a near-mute, reclusive teenager who hides in her bedroom all day, listening to her dead father’s old records: Shirley Bassey, Lulu, Dusty Springfield. Her mother, Mari (Lesley Sharp), on the other hand, goes by the motto “Live life while you can”. To this end, she slurps cans of Tetley’s Bitter, fornicates, and vomits frequently in the kitchen sink. With her foghorn voice, corkscrew peroxide hair and age-inappropriate dress sense (miniskirt, heels, spangly boob tube), she is every inch a monster mother. Hence her daughter’s reclusiveness. The only thing is, Little Voice has an astonishing ability to sing like the greats she listens to. One evening, her mother brings home her latest amour, Ray Say, who manages a couple of strippers. He hears Little Voice singing upstairs, and gets her signed up to perform at the local working-men’s club. She appears a few times, bottles out, the house catches fire, and she runs away into the night with a telephone technician called Billy. This could be said to be spoiling the plot, except “plot” is stretching it a bit.

As Little Voice, Diana Vickers, a star of last year’s X Factor, does indeed have a quite superb voice, but otherwise this is all desperately poor stuff. The dialogue is wearisome and clunky, the acting crude and overdone to the point of pantomime, especially from that usually fine actress Sharp. The director, Terry Johnson, previously responsible for triumphs such as La Cage aux Folles and Rain Man, doesn’t seem to have a clue how to handle it, and the writer Jim Cartwright’s sense of comedy is closely related to that of an early-1970s sitcom — On the Buses, say. The appearance of Ray in one of Mari’s skimpy dressing gowns is supposed to be a cause of general hilarity. It isn’t. And a sample witticism, Mari to Little Voice: “Are you agoraphobical? Cos if you are, you can get out.” I haven’t laughed this little since I last saw The Lenny Henry Show.

One genuine highlight is the dance by Mari and her fat, mostly speechless friend Sadie (Rachel Lumberg), which is premised on the wildly incorrect notion that seeing fat people dance is still really funny, as they wobble and puff so much. Sadly, this really is funny. Sadie gasps, bumps bottoms and jiggles her bosoms, before finally, triumphantly, doing the splits. This permits us all to applaud and wolf-whistle condescendingly, and murmur “Ah, bless”, and feel absolved for laughing at her for being fat. The only trouble is, this lasts for all of 30 seconds before we’re back to the non-story, the crude characterisation and Mari’s braying delivery, like a donkey in labour. If we could just have had Vickers singing for an hour or two, it would have been great. But all we get are faltering, tantalising snatches of Goldfinger, I Wanna Be Loved by You, or As Tears Go By, before they are smothered again. For quite a stretch, the sole point of dramatic interest lies in the question: will Little Voice agree to go on stage? Half an hour later, and the sole dramatic interest is now: will she agree to go on stage again? Cartwright’s characterisation is no better than Dan Brown’s, but he could learn something from him about how to structure a narrative and create suspense.

Only in the second half do we hear Vickers really belting it out, which is superb, and get a glimpse of what a northern working- men’s club might have been like in its heyday. Even more intriguing, when Little Voice finally speaks rather than sings, with a ferocious climactic outburst against her mother in the play’s closing moments, it seems she can act pretty powerfully, too. But that’s all we see of it. For the most part, the poor girl simply has to sit upstairs in a baggy hoodie, staring glumly at a silent record player, while her mother staggers about downstairs, hour after hour, shrieking about her “t***-bone”. It’s a wretched vehicle for all concerned, but especially for Vickers. She deserves to have a chauffeur-driven limousine all the way to Vegas, but sadly she has ended up in a beige-coloured Morris Marina.

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