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The TheatreguideLondon Review
Precious Little Talent
Trafalgar Studios Spring 2011
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 ot 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.
Gerald Berkowitz
Here is what we said about the Edinburgh Fringe production in 2009:
Precious
Little Talent Bedlam
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.
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Review - Precious Little Talent - Trafalgar 2011
