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The Theatreguide.London Review
Precious Little Talent
Trafalgar Studios Spring 2011
Young
playwright Ella Hickson announced her arrival in 2008 with Eight, a
string of unconnected monologues that showed she could create and
sustain characterisations through her words.
She followed up at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2009 with an early version of
Precious Little Talent, whose greatest strengths were still in the
monologues, with some forgivable difficulty in connecting them in what
was perhaps an overly ambitious vision for the play as a whole.
She returns now with a revised and expanded version of the play that
fulfils all her early promise. It is not a masterpiece of major
proportions, but it does what it sets out to do, in an emotionally
involving and thoroughly satisfying way.
A nineteen-year-old American lad meets and seems to hit it off with an
English girl a couple of years older, only for them to discover that
they are already connected through coincidence.
She is in New
York to find the father from whom she has been estranged, but the older
man is in the early stages of dementia, and the boy is his paid carer.
The father desperately wants to keep the truth of his condition from his
daughter - in a particularly moving monologue he explains what a
terrible insult it would be to make her watch him forget her.
The daughter
has her own reasons for feeling rootless and needing to anchor herself
to something or someone to give her a sense of identity. And the boy,
one of nature's gentlemen, is torn between attraction to the girl and
loyalty to the man.
In the course of a Christmas season we watch them dance around each
other, alternately reaching out and drawing back in self-protection, as
we are guided to hope for a happy ending by the playwright's evident and
infectious love for all three of them.
My imperfect memory of the Edinburgh version tells me that Hickson has
retained the strong set pieces - in addition to the father's
monologue,there are delightfully inconsistent accounts of their first
meeting by the boy and girl - and fleshed out the scenes involving all
three, building our sense of their growing trust and connection to each
other.
She has also played down an attempt in the original to overlay a
metaphoric contrast between British pessimism and American optimism,
much to the play's benefit - as much as I admire the ambitiousness of
that added layer, it is best saved for another play.
Keeping the focus on the three characters allows director James Dacre
and the cast - Ian Gelder (father), Olivia Hallinan (daughter) and
Anthony Welsh (carer) - to create and sustain a reality we respond to.
I don't want to overpraise this play. It is a small work, but it
achieves its aim of making us believe in and care about its characters,
and that is no modest achievement.
Here's what we wrote in Edinburgh two years ago:
The
author
of this short play, Ella Hickson, has an abundance of ideas but not
quite the discipline or skill to control them, so her play spins off in
too many directions instead of cohering. But all that means is that
Precious Little Talent is a flawed play by a real writer, and that's a
lot more interesting and exciting than a well-made play by someone with
no real promise. On one level, the play is a standard rom-com, with a
couple who meet cute and then discover a complication - in this case, he
works for her father. But the boy's job is as carer for the man, who is
in the first stages of Alzheimer's, and the father desperately does not
want his daughter to find out. And on top of that, father and daughter
are English and the boy American, and Hickson puts a lot of weight on
the ingrained pessimism of the one and instinctive optimism of the
other. So there are at least three different plays there, and a more
skilled technician than Hickson is at this point might have been able to
unify any two, though probably not all three. There are several very
well-written scenes that testify to Hickson's talent and give her cast
opportunities to shine - Simon Ginty as the boy excitedly describing the
couple's magical meeting and Emma Hiddleston's later slightly more
clear-eyed account of the same event, John McColl explaining how
unbearable it would be to have his daughter watch him forget her, and
Hiddleston seeing the inauguration of President Obama as representing
everything about the American spirit she envies. Gerald
Berkowitz
Gerald Berkowitz
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