Eight

The Pleasance, Islington - 23-25 October 2008

Following its awe-inspiring success at The Edinburgh Festival 2008, Eight transferred to The Pleasance, Islington for a three night run in October. Having scooped a Fringe First, Eight went on to win the NSDF Edinburgh Emerging Artists Award and The Carol Tambor Award, the highest honour at The Edinburgh Festival ensuring a week's run in New York which took place in January.

Hickson is a challenging young British playwright who has produced eight dark and hilariously sardonic monologues about life in 2008. The audience, provided with basic character profiles, selects four from this line-up of eight characters creating an hour of drama in which both the sequence and selection of characters are audience dependent. Swapping the set-top box for black-box theatre, this is bespoke theatre.

The eight endearing characters, hitting adulthood in The Naughties, offer deliciously cynical yet touching snippets of life that question what it is to be 'normal' in a generation where everything has become acceptable. Investigating 2008 from a refreshingly offbeat angle, these eight monologues present obsession in its moral, sexual and religious guises, offering intelligent, politically punchy and incisive writing that rebuffs the definition of contemporary youth as apathetic, drug-munching, no-brainers.

The Edinburgh Fringe, for all it's diversity, complexity and energy is a system so vast that it is very easy to feel lost in and even easier to get lost in. The NSDF Emerging Artists award provides a point of focus that gives new writers and student companies, such as ourselves, hope that there is a way to get noticed amongst the festival quagmire. Winning the NSDF Emerging Artists award has made a huge difference to my career and to those of the cast; having a professional London performance on your CV is vital to smaller companies like us as it gives us access to a network of contacts that is unreachable without the help of NSDF and affords our careers a sense of recognised legitimacy that is difficult to achieve in student theatre. Myself and the cast of Eight will be eternally grateful to NSDF for all the financial, administrative and creative support we received whilst in London, Lu Kemp, the director we worked with for the week helped us immeasurably, offering a fresh perspective and a renewed incentive to work toward our goals. Holly and Chris were also invaluable, offering industry know-how, without which we would have been lost. It is vital that institutions such as NSDF continue to function and receive adequate funding to facilitate opportunities such as the Edinburgh Emerging Artists Competition. Our London performance was the first, vital step into the competitive world of professional theatre and without NSDF, it would never have happened.

(Ella Hickson, Director and Writer of Eight)