Ella Hickson’s Eight opens with one Millie Faucett-Reid, a posh prostitute, in her tennis kit and pearl necklace, bestriding an invisible customer and declaiming Betjeman’s celebrated lines about Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. Here is a writer and director who, at least, knows how to startle and amuse.

In fact, Hickson’s set of eight scintillating monologues are amusing and a whole lot more. Each evening will give you four of the eight possible pieces, only 15 minutes each, selected by audience vote before the curtain rises — so you could conceivably go twice and see a completely different show each time. But this is work of such quality, you wouldn’t mind seeing the same thing twice anyway.

Millie’s opening monologue is filthily funny. She services her various Ruperts, Hugos and Humphreys, in their wing-tipped brogues, with a schoolgirlish enthusiasm, and never, ever descends to “hoi polloi”. The customer with the Miss Joan Hunter Dunn fetish requires her not only to wear tennis kit and wave a racket around, but to climax on exactly the right dactyl. Quite a trick. Another likes to cuddle up to her afterwards and have a jolly good cry.

As a portrait of a working girl, it’s utterly original, and superbly played by Ishbel Mc­Farlane. Millie was initiated into the business by her mother and is extremely proud of her ancestry, the Faucett-Reids having been in the business of “marital supplements” for 500 years. But Millie is well into her thirties, and her career may not have many more years left in it. The wonderful character study ends with a dying fall when a slip reveals that Millie, too, has desires, extending well beyond the bedroom, that will never be met.

An equally brilliant monologue comes from Andre, a gay gallery owner, his impish campery wonderfully caught by Michael Whitham. He got into art because gay men are good at aesthetics, he explains, the same way black men are good at sprinting. His boyfriend does the accounts while he does the schmoozing — his plump, gym-hating, lager-drinking boyfriend, who is virtually heterosexual apart from the fact that he likes sex with men. Clearly, like Millie, an innocent abroad in a corrupt world, when this stolid naïf accompanies Andre to the biennales, he actually looks at the art. Bless.

It is this same boyfriend, we learn as the monologue progresses, who is now hanging inside by an Hermès scarf. Hickson’s imagination is again astounding, as Andre struggles, and pretty much succeeds, in maintaining his composure while waiting for the ambulance, even as his boyfriend still dangles within. Yet you also see all his grief, anger and heartbreak.

As if this weren’t enough, packed into these dazzling 15 minutes (is there a Warhol allusion there?) is a hilariously bitter portrait of the contemporary art world. The joke is that Andre himself, a top gallery owner, knows this. He deals profitably in Tracey Emin prints, well aware that her work is worthless. He alludes to the notorious photo of Emin scooping fistfuls of banknotes towards what he memorably terms, nose pert with distaste, her “lady garden”. The fact that such scathing analysis comes not from a critic or traditionalist, but from a fashionable gallerist, makes it all the more exhilarating.

Two other powerful monologues come from Miles (Solomon Mousley), a City boy and survivor of the July 7 bombings, and Jude (Simon Ginty), a 17-year-old English boy in Provence, losing his virginity to an ageing vamp with voluptuous cleavage, brown and wrinkled “like a Sunday roast”. The writing is consistently good, and emphasises further Hickson’s abiding themes, the loss of innocence, moral corruption and spiritual emptiness.

It turns out that all eight of the monologues come from protagonists in their twenties or thirties, Hickson’s generation. In the press blurb, she says she is trying to respond to her peers’ overwhelming trait of apathy — but she’s somewhat better than this usual clichéd statement. She is already a fully fledged satirist of real power and insight, at her most effective when adding her terrific sense of comedy to the mix. With her finger firmly on the sickly, fluttering pulse of the contemporary — a world of “commercial, aesthetic and sexual excess”, in her own words — her targets are nevertheless time-honoured: bad art, sexual dysfunction, the corrosiveness of “luxury”, as the ancient satirists called it, or “consumerism”, as we call it.

Eight is a piece that both delivers and suggests enormous promise. It thoroughly deserves its West End airing, after making a huge impact at last year’s Fringe and picking up the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award.

As I emerged out of the Trafalgar Studios into the dusk, there on the square stood the dignified statues of Major General Sir Henry Havelock, General Sir Charles James Napier, George IV — and, on the fourth plinth, a fat woman showing off by dancing salsa badly. Yep, 21st-century Britain really is full of rubbish. Plenty for a satirist such as Hickson to feast on.

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