As its title suggests, Ella Hickson’s 2008 Edinburgh Fringe First-winning play consists of eight monologues — but you get to hear only four of them. The 23-year-old writer reckons hers is a generation beset by choices, and that making them means jettisoning other equally tempting options. So ticket-holders vote, online or on a touch-screen at the theatre, for the quartet of characters whose stories they most want to hear, creating their own customised performance. The unselected four remain seated at the rear of the stage, tantalisingly voiceless.

This neatly references our sophisticated consumerist society, its hunger for arm’s-length interactivity evidenced in everything from social-networking sites to the TV shows in which the outcome is influenced by viewer voting. My preferences were overruled by the majority; I wanted to meet Millie, the upper-crust dominatrix, and Andre, the gallery-owner, who finds his lover hanged with a Hermes scarf.

Never mind; instead, we got a schoolboy, Jude, experiencing first passion and then repulsion with a middle-aged woman in the French Riviera; a Scottish single mum, Bobby, struggling to give her children the perfect Christmas; Miles, a Merrill Lynch hotshot who survived the London 7/7 attacks only to lay waste to his life; and Astrid, who is cheating on her long-term boyfriend out of fear and inadequacy.

Hickson has an evocative turn of phrase — Jude longingly describes his ageing idol’s cleavage as “crinkly and brown, like a Sunday roast” — and there’s sharp-eyed intelligence in each 15-minute vignette. But they have limitations, and as a whole the evening is repetitive. Thematically, the monologues offer the familiar stuff of twentysomething angst, and the four I saw all shared one dynamic— narrative build to passionate outburst. Still, the contained performances are packed with pungent detail. Simon Ginty as Jude skilfully negotiates callow testosterone-fuelled youth and adult-male aggression, his tormented face mottling pink and white. And Hickson’s nascent talent, on the evidence of this assured debut, will grow into something well worth watching.

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