Ella Hickson: A playwright who grabs the zeitgeist

Ella Hickson's new play offers a sharp snapshot of modern Britain. She's on the cusp of greatness, says Alice Jones

It's perhaps a little early to call Ella Hickson the theatrical voice of her generation. But only a little. She wrote her first play three years ago, while in the middle of her finals at Edinburgh University. That was Eight, an interactive Talking Heads for 21st-century teens and twentysomethings, where audiences were asked to vote on which four of the eight monologues they wanted to see performed that night. Slick, a little gimmicky and dazzlingly written, it transferred from student theatre to the West End and New York and made Hickson's name when she was just 23 years old.

Since then the playwright, now 26, has been conscientiously carving her niche with a set of engaged and engaging dramas which pit the realities of life as a young Briton against a lyrical, romantic and occasionally macabre background. The speakers in Eight ranged from a shellshocked soldier-turned-mortuary worker to a hedonism-driven survivor of the London bombings and a jingoistic Home Counties courtesan. In Hot Mess, staged on the dancefloor of a trendy Edinburgh nightclub last summer, she tackled the ins and outs of Noughties sexuality with an alcohol-fuelled love story involving twins with only one heart between them. Most recently, she wrote a short piece for Theatre 503's Coalition season about "Dave" preparing for his first Prime Minister's Questions, to an insistent internal soundtrack of doubt and Mumford & Sons.

None of these, though, quite grab the zeitgeist like Precious Little Talent, a story of disillusioned twentysomethings graduating into a world that has been stripped of opportunity. Hickson's second play, it ran at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2009 and is now brought to the West End by fellow bright young thing James Dacre, the director of last year's Olivier-winning The Mountaintop. The three-hander about a jobless, directionless graduate, Joey, her estranged father in New York and his idealistic, young, Obama-obsessed carer, has become ever more relevant in the two years since she wrote it, says Hickson, who was working on rewrites during the student riots. "When I wrote it, it was a call to arms, as times were getting tough. Two years later, times have only got tougher for that generation of graduates. I have friends who graduated with me in 2008, with good degrees, who are still waiting tables."

For Hickson, the play was also a way of coming to terms with her status as the Next Big Thing, hence the provocative title. "It was asking the question, 'what next?' Both for me and for my generation. Writing it was one of the most painful experiences of my whole life," she says. "When you first start and there's all that hype and you have no control over your trajectory, it's really uncomfortable. It's once it gets quieter that you start to establish things that are much more durable, and solid."

Born in Surrey to an English teacher and a businessman, Hickson began taking shows up to the Fringe as a teenager. At university, she was part of a theatrical crowd, producing Lucy Kirkwood's early plays and the sketch troupe The Penny Dreadfuls. "It was an environment where things felt very possible. Everyone was having a bash at writing, so I thought why not?"

Now a full-time playwright – "I put it on the census!" – she has her own company, Tantrums, and moved from Edinburgh to London earlier this year. She's just finished a play, Boys, for a Royal Court writing group, developed out of a This Life-style sitcom she wrote for BBC Scotland about a group of boys living in a house on Alva Street, Edinburgh, and is working on a new piece for Headlong (who co-produced Lucy Prebble's Enron) about oil rigs.

All of which makes Hickson more than just the latest in a line of hot, young, female writers, following in the footsteps of Polly Stenham. "It's ridiculous. There are just as many boys writing out there but they aren't getting produced because there's a hype around girls. I don't think we should have a big drinks party for me and Lucy Prebble and Lucy Kirkwood," she says. "I want to work with people of my own generation who are doing exciting stuff. It's about interrogating each other's work to try and understand what's going on at the moment."

'Precious Little Talent', Trafalgar Studios, London SW1 (0844 871 7632) to 30 April