Edinburgh: Precious Little Talent

Ella Hickson’s first play, Eight, consisted - as the name suggests - of eight monologues, only four of which were performed on any given night, with the audience selecting the pieces they wanted to see.

The monologues were loosely themed around the shifting economic situation and how young people, accustomed to a world rich in choice and possibility, were being forced to adjust. It contained moments of inspired writing but the format, the lack of interaction between the pieces, ended up a limiting one.


In her second play, Precious Little Talent, Hickson has adopted a more conventional dramatic structure, yet it is one that really pays off. The three-hander begins with Sam, a bright-eyed nineteen year old American, recounting his first encounter with Joey, a rooftop union that led to them both charging through the midnight streets of New York and ending up at Grand Central Station in each other’s arms.

Having recently lost her job, Joey has come to America to visit her father, George, a former academic with a sharp, dismissive manner. He lives alone and it is clear that there has been some drift between father and daughter since the end of his marriage. What Joey does not yet know is that the young man she shared her impulsive evening with, her cinematic swoop through the city, is also her father’s carer – that her dad is diminishing, unravelling, losing his capacity to care for himself.

Precious Little Talent cements what Eight merely hinted at: that Hickson is a writer of some skill. The emotional tone of the play is admirably nuanced. The relationship between father and daughter – affectionate yet volatile, needy yet abrupt – is a complex but recognisable one, and while the play contains moments of acute sadness, there is also much wit in evidence. The cultural gulf between the English and Americans proves a particularly rich source of humour.

Not everything stands up to scrutiny. There are some questions Hickson, intentionally or otherwise, leaves unanswered. Sam’s actual role remains ill-defined: is he a nurse? Is caring for George his main job or something he does while he studies? The sudden budding relationship between Sam and Joey also feels a little too convenient. Yet George’s monologues, his moments alone, are incredibly moving and John McColl is superb as a man coming to grips with a lessening of self he is powerless to halt.

The two younger cast members both do an excellent job with their roles. There’s clearly more depth to Sam then his beaming exterior would initially suggest; he is sensitive to George’s needs and perceptive about Joey’s fears and anxieties. Emma Hiddleston, as the slightly stiff English girl, comes across as proud and self-sufficient yet at the same time she is clearly looking for something solid and secure to cling on to.

As in Eight, Hickson is interested in what it means to arrive at adulthood just as the rules seem to be shifting, as the old roads are swamped in snow and new paths need to be dug. The shadow of a past generation’s aspirations still looms large but this is a new world and Hickson is one of its most astute voices.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Eight at Trafalgar Studios

There’s an interactive element to Ella Hickson’s Eight. As audience members arrive at the theatre, they are directed towards a touch-screen monitor near the box office. There they can read through the synopses of eight possible monologues and vote for the four they would like to see most. People like to vote for things, we like to have a choice or the illusion of choice, and so only the four most popular will be performed, though all eight actors remain on stage throughout the evening as a reminder that choice is as much about what is excluded as what is included, and that for the four monologues we do see there will be four that we don't. (Interestingly, during its New York run, all eight monologues were performed nightly, changing the concept of the show entirely).

Those that were performed on the night I attended were all solidly acted, particularly by Simon Ginty as the teenage Jude, despatched to an overseas language school by his father and told to "return a man." There he develops an increasingly intense passion for his middle-aged French landlady and loses himslef in thoughts o perfume and lingerie. It's the lesser of the four selected pieces but his performance sells it. Solomon Mousley is also compelling in the most memorable piece of the night, as Miles, a young American Merrill Lynch exec who "won everything he touched" and whose life was derailed by the 7/7 attacks.

While there’s no denying that Hickson is a skilled writer, some of the pieces were far stronger than others and the simple presentation of these character sketches was rather straightforward in comparison with the unusual set-up (however, I now gather there are meant to be some projections that were not used on the night I went). The notion of choice and chance is tied most overtly with Miles’ narrative, but the inclusion of some of the other pieces felt rather arbitrary, despite Hickson's assertion that the characters are all somehow representative of a generation, "showing the effects, when taken to extremes, of growing up in a world in which the central value system is based on an ethic of commercial, aesthetic and sexual excess."

Another monologue concerns Holly McLay's Bobby, a single mum with two young children who gets fired from Tesco in the run up to Christmas. She gets a new job with a wealthy, elderly woman, helping her to prepare for the coming festivities and becomes entranced by the woman's life - with the rich, Christmas smell of her kitchen as they prepare puddings - and also frustrated by what she sees, by the things and the life that she will in all likelihood never possess. The gap between her life and this woman's life - and the impossibility of bridging it - is just too big and Bobby's frustation spills out of her in a sudden expletive-flecked flow.

The final piece of the four concerned Gwendolen von Einsiedel's Astrid, a woman returning to her lover's bed in the middle of the night after a liaison with another man. Both these pieces feel like they are scratching at the skin of something true and honest, but there is not room to dig deeper, to explore more, and the Christmas setting of the former piece feels a little obvious.

The very nature of the production means that each performance will be different and it seems likely that on another night the sense of disjointedness I felt may not have been so strong. But, all the same, there is something a bit anticlimactic about the show after the novelty of its opening gambit.

Extended version of a review that appeared in The Stage.