Oil by Ella Hickson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Oil by Ella Hickson Kimberly Skye Richards Oil. By Ella Hickson. Directed by Carrie Cracknell. Almeida Theatre, London. October 21, 2016. From the Indigenous resistance at Standing Rock to artist-activist groups like Platform and Liberate Tate staging interventions in global arts institutions to protest sponsorship by oil corporations, dramatic conflicts over oil production and its transportation have saturated our media in recent years. Despite the theatricality of petro-politics, conflicts of resource extraction have seldom found their way to the stage. In her new play Oil, Ella Hickson transforms oil’s global history into a human story, one that asks audiences to suspend their disbelief across 200 years of action to follow a mother and daughter from the birth of the petroleum industry to the end of the age of oil. Directed by Carrie Cracknell at the Almeida Theatre in London, the play’s premiere production prompted serious reflection on fossil capitalism’s seductions and costs. Oil moves away from clichés about male oil executives as cutout villains of fossil capitalism to spotlight the journey of a single mother determined to better the situation of her child. Hickson sets the play in 1899 at a remote smallholding near Cornwall at the Singers’ family farm, the image of a premodern agrarian society focused on simple reproduction. When the family dismisses an American oil dealer’s offer to buy their property—despite the lifestyle that the sale would afford them—May, who is pregnant and wants a better future for her child, decides to leave during the night, traveling “through lands, through empires, through time” on a journey fueled by maternal love. Played brilliantly by Anne-Marie Duff, May embodied the pioneering spirit reinvigorated by the neoliberal order. Her journey saw her go from carrying out domestic duties, to working as a server at the British imperial headquarters in Persia in 1908, to making executive decisions for a multinational oil corporation in London in the 1970s, to serving as a Member of Parliament in the twenty-first century. As she gained more powerful positions in society and was better able to provide for her child, she became more deeply enmeshed in geopolitical petro-violence. Through May’s associations with the oil industry, the play illuminated how petro-imperialism operates through the decisions of individual people acting in their best interests. The fascinating trajectory of Oil is that it reminded those audience members aligned with the anti-fossil fuel movement of the cruelly optimistic passé of oil, energy, and capitalism. The performance also offered commentary on the limitations of women’s independence, as Hickson crafted the codependency of May and her daughter Amy’s relationship into a [End Page 582] metaphor for the codependency of the British Empire and its colonies. Three scenes dramatized the birth, peak, and imagined demise of Britain’s efforts to explore, discover, develop, and transport oil in Iran, Libya, and Iraq. They represented the transformation of “infantile” oil-producing countries into mature, rebellious, independent nations that resent supervision and insist that they be freed from its oppression. Increasingly desperate to maintain access, the parental figure was increasingly willing to make ethical compromises and unleash misfortune on less powerful others. Click for larger view View full resolution The dawn of the age of oil in Oil. (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith.) The end of Oil projected a bleak image of our prospective “tough oil” future, with May and Amy once again living on the Singer farm, struggling to stay warm, and arguing about whether they can afford to charge the car or take a hot bath. May yearns for intimacy and physical contact, but her relationship with Amy has deteriorated beyond repair, and men across time, even men who are caring and respectful, have never been able to satisfy her needs. The wreckage of Amy and May’s relationship, captured brilliantly through the nonnaturalistic time signature of the play, left us to contemplate if loneliness and disappointment are the excruciating costs of progress: in what ways must powerful women be willing to compromise? Would we be happier if we demanded less of ourselves? Oil is indicative of a new form of epic theatre that aims to...