Made in Edinburgh

Every year the Fringe makes stars of a small number of lucky performers – but what happens now that the festival is over and everyone has gone home? Roger Cox and Tim Cornwell meet three of this year's discoveries, and ask them all what the future has in store for them

ELLA HICKSON

'I need a waitressing job to earn some money and live'

FOR A 23-year-old Edinburgh graduate wondering what to do when the Fringe ended, Ella Hickson suddenly finds her hands extremely full. But she is still wondering how to make ends meet financially.

Eight, a series of eight monologues by the first-time writer and director, performed by the Edinburgh University Theatre Company, won a Fringe First and the National Drama Student Festival award, and the coveted Carol Tambor Award – scooping Hickson an all-expenses-paid New York run for the show next year.

In the meantime, Hickson will be working with the Domito company, who produced Before We Remember in this year's Fringe, joining the Traverse's young writers' group in October, and aiming to finish a half-written book about the class system, a theme that runs through much of her work.

She also helps run Poetryschmoetry, a young poets collective in Edinburgh that meets monthly to recite newly written work.

Despite all this, the writing has yet to pay the bills. "I need to get a waitressing job so I can earn some money and live," she says. "Economically, not a lot of it is sustaining. It pays for itself, the trips to London and New York, but I still have to pay rent and things. I just can't find a waitressing job amenable to me to take a month off to go to New York."

Originally from Guildford, Hickson graduated from Edinburgh University in English in May and plays to stay in the city. "It's too expensive to move to London and I love Edinburgh," she says.

One challenge posed by the New York trip will be to re-fashion Eight, in which the audience vote to choose four out of eight 15-minute character performances, for an American audience.

One character, Bobby, played by Holly McLay, is a struggling single mother who sees how the other half lives when she gets a job helping a posh Edinburgh matriarch plan for Christmas. "They think that will translate, we need to haul in her accent a little, which is feasible," she says.

She's more worried about Millie, with Ishbel McFarlane playing a high-class prostitute, in a "three-layered irony on the British class system".

"They've suggested we slow things down, but I think a bit of a re-write is necessary," she says. Another character, Danny, who describes having his leg stripped of skin in an Iraqi bomb blast, has brought warnings that it is too graphic for the US. "One of the characters believes she speaks with Christ and we have been warned that might be taken too literally," says Hickson.

SARAH MILLICAN

'You don't have to be miserable in order to be funny'

GEORDIE comic Sarah Millican built her Fringe show around her divorce four years before. Yesterday, after winning Best Newcomer in the if.comedy awards. the 33-year-old was driving home with her boyfriend, fellow comedian Gary Delaney.

"I feel in a really good position at the moment because Edinburgh went ridiculously well, couldn't really have gone any better," she says. "Gary wasn't doing a show in Edinburgh, he was working and came up for a few days to spend time with me, and he's driving me home via the Lakes for lunch."

After a well-earned week's holiday, near (but definitely not in) Benidorm she will have a meeting with her agent to find out what interest the award may be generating. "My agent likes plans, so we are going to do a one or two-year one," she says.

Millican already has a full list of gigs in September, working four to five nights a week and going from Jongleurs, Cardiff, to the Vauxhall Tavern in London and the Comedy Store in Manchester.

Her career seems thoroughly established for a "newcomer". She has written comedy for the BBC among others and won the Amused Moose comedy awards in 2005.

She put material gathered over three-and-a-half years into her Edinburgh show, and is now worrying about what she'll find for next year's. "To have to write a new one over the next ten months is quite a scary prospect," she says.

She also has the if.comedy awards show ahead of her in London this autumn, with the date yet to be confirmed. "It was originally at the Garrick and now it's at the Apollo," she says. "Oh my God, that's huge."

She's also working on a script to be recorded for Radio 4 in September. "I've developed a show on the worst marriage counsellor in the world," she says. "I've released my inner bitch and all of the things you'd like to say but can't say. It's based on things I've experienced, but it's not me. It's inappropriate, so it's quite fun."

Millican drew on her experience as a sardonic single woman coming out of seven years of marriage. She joked about having sex with men in their thirties ("generally much better, but you've got to rub their legs afterwards for cramp"). Now that she has a boyfriend who drives her away so nicely from Edinburgh, where is the comic potential? "We do have funny times anyway," she says. "You don't have to be miserable in order to be funny. I'm not going to sabotage any relation-ships just to get a show out of it. I'm quite capable of writing nice things."

BARBERSHOPERA

'Whatever happens next, I won't miss that sweatbox of a Portakabin'

KEVIN Spacey called it "hilarious". Andrew Motion called it "tight as a drum". Jim Bowen said he "loved it". Not even in their wildest dreams could the creators of Barbershopera have imagined a better festival than the one they've just enjoyed.

Director Sarah Tipple and performers Tom Green, Rob Castell, Mark Hole and Lara Stubbs picked up a string of four- and five-star reviews throughout August and, at the Music Theatre Matters Awards at the end of the month, they won gongs for both Most Promising New Musical and Best Lyrics in a New Musical.

In a note on the back of the programme for their show, they cheekily invited Cameron Mackintosh to get in touch. At the time of going to press they were still waiting for a call from the West End supremo, but even if Mackintosh doesn't pick up the phone, they are surely destined to play bigger, more impressive stages than the Portakabin they have lately been occupying in the Pleasance Courtyard.

Barbershopera is based on a very simple, very silly premise. An all-male barbershop quartet are preparing for the Eurovision Barbershop Contest in Ljubljana when their soprano, Toni, walks out on them. The three remaining members then stumble across a feisty female opera singer who has just lost her job at the Royal Opera House and, after some initial misgivings, the unlikely foursome agree to work together and travel to Slovenia to take on a sinister Swiss team, who dominate the event.

The real Barbershopera story began four years ago when the show's creators, Tom Green and Rob Castell, met at the University of East Anglia.

"We used to be a duo and do covers in pubs as well as a few of our own songs," says Green, "but we also had a barbershop quartet – we used to sing Blue Moon and things like that.

"Everyone in the group was an actor, so we thought 'Hey, we should do a barbershop musical' but then the idea lay dormant for a few years while we did other things."

"The key thing, I think, has been the girl aspect," Castell continues. "We were in London last year trying to get the thing moving again. Tom suggested getting a girl involved. At first I wasn't sure, but then that became the crux of the thing. I think that's when it really became an exciting new idea."

Word-of-mouth recommendations led Green and Castell to singer/songwriter Mark Hole and professional singer Lara Stubbs. Once Sarah Tipple, a director-in-residence at the Young Vic, came on board, the jigsaw was complete.

Much of the charm of Barbershopera comes from its ramshackle feel. Could this be preserved in a larger venue? Tipple reckons it could.

"If we knew it was going to go to the West End, I think we're savvy enough to sit around and rehash it slightly in order to make it work just as well, but in a slightly different way."

"Whatever happens next," says Castell, "I certainly won't miss that sweatbox of a Portakabin."