Ella Hickson’s plays move between intimate relationships and the forces that shape public life. In Oil, a mother and daughter’s story unfolds across a changing world organised around fossil fuels. In The Writer, the subject is the making of theatre itself: who holds power, what art demands and how gender affects creative work. Across a career that has also included adaptations, a thriller made for binaural sound and her first play, Eight, Hickson has worked in forms ranging from family drama to speculative history.
Early life and a first success
Born in 1985, Hickson was brought up in Guildford, Surrey, and attended Guildford High School from 1996 to 2003. Her first play, Eight, was produced by the Edinburgh University Theatre Company. At the 2008 Edinburgh Fringe it won a Fringe First, the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award and the NSDF Emerging Artists Award.
The play then travelled beyond the festival circuit: it toured to New York in January 2009 and opened at Trafalgar Studios in London in July that year. Hickson’s second play, Precious Little Talent, opened at Trafalgar Studios in March 2011, directed by James Dacre. In 2011, The Guardian named her among four young playwrights to watch. These early productions established a career that would take her work to major British stages, while the variety of projects that followed resisted a single subject or style.
Adaptations and new directions
In 2012, Hickson’s third play, Boys, premiered at HighTide Festival Theatre, directed by Robert Icke for Headlong Theatre. It subsequently toured to Nuffield Southampton Venues and Soho Theatre in London. The sequence brought her work into different theatrical settings, from a festival premiere to touring and a London run.
Hickson also turned to familiar stories. Her adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s Wendy & Peter Pan was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company for its 2013 Christmas season, directed by Jonathan Munby, and returned for Christmas 2015. In 2014, her adaptation of the legends of Merlin opened at Royal & Derngate and Nuffield Southampton, directed by Liam Steel. Alongside original plays, these projects show her working with stories that already have a life in the culture, reshaping them for performance.
Oil, family and dependence
Oil premiered at the Almeida in October 2016, with Anne-Marie Duff in the cast and Carrie Cracknell directing. Its sweep extends from the late nineteenth century into a dystopian future, using changing periods and settings to consider humanity’s dependence on oil and the social and political consequences of that dependence. Rather than treating the subject only as a large-scale resource question, the play centres on May and her daughter, Amy. Their relationship gives its argument about energy, survival and change a domestic and generational scale.
The combination of those perspectives is central to the play’s design: an evolving history of oil is set beside the continuing relationship between a parent and child. Questions about resources and the future are consequently bound to questions of inheritance and the choices made for the next generation. The play’s movement across time also allows it to connect historical context with speculation, rather than confining its subject to a single period.
The theatre turns inwards
In 2018, the Almeida staged Hickson’s The Writer, directed by Blanche McIntyre and featuring Sam West, Romola Garai and Lara Rossi. The play examines the power structures of theatre and the position of a young female writer within them. Its concerns include the nature of art, the sacrifices asked of artists and the ways gender bias can persist in creative spaces.
Hickson uses a direct relationship with the audience to question the conventions of theatrical storytelling and the audience’s place in it. That formal choice brings the play’s scrutiny of power into the performance itself: the subject is not only what happens to a writer, but also how theatre frames and presents such a story. The work therefore looks both outwards, at institutions and gender, and inwards, at the form through which those issues are represented.
In 2019, Hickson’s binaural thriller Anna opened at the National Theatre. She collaborated with sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, and Natalie Abrahami directed. The project took her work into a sound-led format, adding another kind of theatrical experience to a career that had already included new plays, adaptations and work on major stages. Hickson also teaches at Oxford University. In June 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature through its “40 Under 40” initiative.
Why Ella Hickson deserves a place in British Legacy
Ella Hickson’s place in British theatre rests on a body of work that gives different forms and subjects room to meet. Eight began with a Fringe production and went on to win three awards before travelling to New York and opening in London. Later work reached the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Almeida and the National Theatre. That record describes more than a succession of venues: it shows a playwright moving from an early production into a varied career across British theatre, including original plays, adaptations and a binaural thriller.
The plays also take on questions that matter beyond their plots. Oil connects humanity’s dependence on a resource with the relationship between May and Amy, making historical change and the future legible through a family. The Writer examines gender and power within the theatre world while asking how theatre itself shapes what an audience sees. These are specific contributions: Hickson uses theatrical form to bring wider structures into contact with individual lives. Her work, teaching and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature place her within contemporary British cultural life, while its range—from Barrie and Merlin to speculative drama and sound-led storytelling—demonstrates a continuing engagement with how stories are made and retold.
Sources
Ella Hickson — Wikipedia revision
Adapted in part from Ella Hickson by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.