Edinburgh: Hot Mess at Hawke and Hunter

Ella Hickson’s latest play for the fringe, her third, has a mythical quality.

Polo and Twitch are twins, but they only have one heart between them. Twitch loves too much, Polo not enough. They live on a tiny island, five miles by two, which is slowly being lost to the sea.

Twitch leaves a mark on very man she desires: a scar, a scald, torn skin. She believes love should last, that it should leave an indelible stain. This is in direct contrast to Polo’s childhood friend Jax, who gets a thrill from casual sex. She likes the anonymity of it, the adrenaline surge, and takes comfort in the knowledge that she doesn’t have to see them again if she chooses not to; if they ask for her phone number, she declines to give it.


Polo has returned to the island for his (and Twitch’s) birthday, having left, escaped; during his time away Twitch has met and fallen for Billy, a charming American, and only the second man she has allowed herself to become physically involved with. The four of them, Polo, Twitch, Billy and Jax, head out to a nightclub, the site of many a sexual conquest and drunken stumble, a scene of elation and humiliation fused. There is drink, there is dancing; there is an ill-advised homage to the late Patrick Swayze.

Staged in a subterranean section of Edinburgh nightclub Hawke and Hunter, with strips of neon imbedded in the floor and music supplied by a DJ, this is a confident production with something to say, about sex and love and the space in between. Hickson is interested in how people negotiate their relationships, sexual or otherwise, in what they’re looking for, what they want from one another.

The play is more poetic in voice than its predecessor. The compelling Precious Little Talent was a more naturalistic piece and it’s clear that Hickson is pushing herself stylistically. She’s helped by a strong cast, all familiar faces from her debut, Eight. Gwendolen Chatfield and Michael Whitham play the twins, her open and needy, him prim and stiff, arch-eyebrowed. Kerri Hall is particularly memorable as the brash Jax, teetering on neon pink heels, vulnerability concealed by an abundance curves and Lycra and confidence; Solomon Mousley completes the quartet with an understated turn as Billy.

For all its many strengths this feels like a play with a split personality, stubbornly tugging in two different directions. It seems to be trying to be both an interrogation of contemporary sexual mores and a more lyrical and poetic piece about human connection.

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.