With a title like that, it may seem that playwright Ella Hickson is asking for her new play to be put down, but in fact she proves she has more than a little talent with a drama that is witty, sharp and engaging.
Sam is a black 19-year-old American man; Joey is a white 23-year-old British woman. She is over in the States to visit her elderly father, a university professor whom she hasn’t seen for two years. Before arriving at his house in the middle of the night she has a random, slightly illicit, encounter with a stranger on a tube train; the next day she finds that stranger, Sam, is her father’s friend and carer.
Hickson makes the very different worlds of these three people collide, clashing against each other until eventually finding some sort of awkward harmony. Olivia Hallinan’s Joey is a superficially self-assured – yet at times childishly selfish – university graduate for whom life is not working out quite as she expected. Endearing, slightly gauche Sam (Anthony Welsh) is the more humble of the two, intrigued by her Englishness while she is exasperated by his American ways. He becomes the conciliator between Joey and her dad, George (Ian Gelder), who is gradually losing his own sense of self as old age sets in.
Essentially, Precious Little Talent is an exploration of identity and aspiration, and what happens when life doesn’t turn out as we expect it to. Hickson wraps this up in a witty portrayal of the culture clash between Britain and America and, to some extent, between men and women, and youth and experience. Some neat language contrasts between Sam and Joey show how meanings can get lost in translation, Joey and George struggle to understand each other’s position in life, while Sam’s inability to make tea to the satisfaction of George is a running joke.
Director James Dacre keeps things moving – despite some expositional monologues which sap the pace towards the end – while Emma Laxton’s evocative music creates a dreamy, at times ominous, atmosphere for this entertaining and thought-provoking new work.
CB