Eight **** TNT

Friday 17 July 2009 16:59 GMT

I don’t know whether the financial consequences were intentional, but this well-written production rather shoots itself in the foot as far as potentially doubling ticket sales is concerned. A hit at last year’s Edinburgh festival, it consists of eight 15 minute monologues – except, when it comes down to it, it doesn’t.

As the audience arrives at the theatre, everyone is asked to vote via touch screen for the quartet of individuals whose stories they would like to hear, selecting them with the help of mug shots and a brief summary of each character’s situation. In the auditorium, all eight actors stand facing the front until the lights dim and they take their seats in the wings. Cued by a snatch of music, only the four with the most votes are given the chance, one by one, to tell their tales, leaving the remaining quartet surplus to requirements on that particular (and possibly every other) night.

Perhaps that’s part of the point and mirrors the apathy which writer/ director Ella Hickson detected among her twenty something friends when she asked them what defined their generation. It’s a shame, though – who’s going to take the risk of forking out all over again when there’s no guarantee you’ll get to see the ones you missed first time round?

So, sadly, I’ll never learn more about Millie the hooker servicing her high class clients whilst dressed in tennis whites, gay Andre who finds his partner hanging in their art gallery, Danny back from Iraq, or the precise nature of Mona’s divine encounter.

Unfaithful Astrid’s early morning confidences as she sneaks home to her sleeping partner provide the least accomplished episode of those I did see. But I was impressed by Holly McLay’s struggling single mum Bobby who gets a wistful taste of what a family Christmas could be like, Simon Ginty’s teenage Jude, seduced (albeit temporarily) by the sexual allure of his 60-year-old hostess in the South of France, and by Solomon Mousley’s American Miles, a highflying Merill Lynch broker whose charmed life is splintered into amnesiac excess when the chance act of giving a July 7th suicide bomber a 10p piece for a Mars bar randomly saves his life.

Hickson is definitely a talent to watch – I just wish that for this West End transfer she’d ditched the gimmicky consumer selection process in favour of the chance to savour more of the engaging insight this young playwright so evidently possesses.

Trafalgar Studios (2), Whitehall, SW1A 2DY Charing Cross tube (0870 060 6632) ambassadortickets.com/trafalgarstudios till 25th July (£18 - £20)