Eight

It’s a neat gimmick, presumably designed to encourage return audiences as well as crank up the originality factor (after all, an evening of monologues isn’t exactly redrawing the boundaries). On the downside, it means that half the cast of eight remain largely unused, as only four characters are featured in each performance.

On the night I attended we got Millie, a high class hooker providing ironing and Sunday roasts along with a “good old fashioned bonk”, traumatised soldier Danny, cheating girlfriend Astrid and flamboyant art dealer Andre, whose misguided boyfriend has ended it all with the aid of a Hermes scarf.

All of them are representative of the ‘apathetic generation’, described by Hickson in the programme notes as having grown up “in a world in which the central value system is based on an ethic of commercial, aesthetic and sexual excess”. On this point she’s bang on – today’s twentysomethings (and I speak as one) are largely characterised by a fundamental lack of value, place and purpose.

But not all the monologues hit their mark. Bodybuilder-turned-soldier Danny (Henry Peters), is a sad but not wholly understandable character, while Andre, though amusingly played by Michael Whitham, smacks of stereotype. But when Eight is good, it’s really good, and the writing is generally rich, informed and stock full of sharp observations; Astrid wryly deduces that the guilt she feels for sleeping with another man is actually a twisted form of power, while Millie’s hidden yearning for an old-fashioned family life is a typical symptom of the children of the divorce generation.

With the outlook for under-25s looking especially bleak now in the wake of recent unemployment figures, Eight is a timely examination of the problems they’ve inherited, and provides clues as to where they might be heading.