Hull Truck’s cracking production of Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice at the Oxford Playhouse this week confirms the excellence of a play that won two major awards on its first appearance in the early 1990s.

That both should have been for ‘best comedy’ continues to surprise me, since the piece has little to provoke laughter, except from people amused by others’ misfortunes.

This will be understood by anyone familiar with the film version starring Jane Horrocks as the withdrawn, perhaps autistic, chanteuse of the title and Michael Caine as the seedy agent who exploits her talents — as well as the boozy availability of her sluttish mother.

The last mentioned — superbly presented here by Helen Sheals — is much the most interesting character in the play. Widowed some years earlier, Mari Hoff still tries to find enjoyment in life — chiefly from the many bottles stashed around the filthy kitchen of her Lancashire home and the sex bouts these facilitate. Often to be found sharing the details of her sordid encounters is her fat and inarticulate neighbour Sadie (touchingly portrayed by Lisa Riley), whose loyalty does not spare her from her friend’s acid tongue. So imaginative is Mari in her use of profanities that these come to develop a poetry all of their own and — yes — raise a smile even if you would rather not.

Meanwhile upstairs, the emotionally damaged ‘LV’ is still mourning her much-loved dad and treasuring the LPs he bequeathed her. Her obsessive regard for these — the work of Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Bassey and other celebrated female singers — is reminiscent of that shown for her animal ornaments by Laura Wingfield, in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.

Powerful performances of the songs the records contain (brilliantly given by Lauren Hood) infuriate her mother but on first hearing amaze her greaseball lover, failed showbiz agent Ray Say (Neil McCaul), who is determined to make her a star (in the mould of what a 2011 audience might see as ‘another Susan Boyle’).

Alas, she comes a cropper during her initial step on the ladder to success, a spot at the local social club whose wise-cracking, bewigged compere will be recognised, in Jack Chissick’s buttonholing performance, by anyone familiar with these peculiarly northern entertainment venues. Later, she returns with great success to the same place, though it remains something of a puzzle as to how Ray Say has achieved this turnabout.

Not the least commendable feature of this impeccably acted production (director Hannah Chissick) is Susannah Henry’s set. This is required to present the upstairs and downstairs, plus the inside and outside, of the Hoff house (and, moreover, show the aftermath of a fire there), while being able to transform on an instant into the social club. There is even an elevating platform to deliver to LV’s bedroom window her scarcely less tongue-tied admirer, the telephone engineer Billy (a fine professional debut by Philip Hill-Pearson).