Oil at the Almeida Theatre

Oil. The word itself invokes a plethora of abstract trauma and guilt, both historical and contemporary: imperialism, colonialism, war, the finite. Playwright Ella Hickson is acutely aware of these dreaded connotations and attempts to wrestle them head-on in an astonishing new play showing at the Almeida Theatre. It’s not often that a production speaks of the past, present and future with equal profundity and chilling resonance like Oil does.

Set over a duration of 150 years across numerous geographies from Cornwall to Iran, this is a show that dispenses with temporal reality to form a more artful and grandiose articulation. Told through the parochial familial drama of a time-hopping May (Anne-Marie Duff), it is a troubled mother-daughter relationship that forms the emotional crux of the play and serves as a prism through which the magnitudinal geopolitical context exists to chew over and reflect upon. As their relationship sours, the audience witness the noxious destruction caused by a resource that people depend upon and also has a seemingly sentient evil. By embracing the complexity of the issue, Oil is neither pedagogic nor didactic; it does not exist to lecture, moralise or even inform, but to show and to trust its audience.

Anne-Marie Duff is beyond exceptional in her role. Starting life as a pregnant housewife in a Cornish farm house during the late 1890s, her character arc undergoes a gradual and convincing shift come each new time-space transition. After leaving Cornwall, May works as a servant with the British Empire as they scour Persia for black gold, then as a 1970s corporate executive for a drilling corporation, defending her capitalistic right to exploit Libya’s oil reserves when threatened of nationalism by Gaddafi’s regime, and eventually into an overweight mediocrity in a chilly prediction of our post-Brexit, post-oil future (unfortunately, adorning the actors in fat suits is no less witty as satire than Pixar’s Wall-E). While this final prediction of the future is disconcerting and affecting – one in which the Chinese spear-head operations to colonise and exploit the natural resources of the moon – it is also bathetic in tone to what has preceded it. It seems a strange point to finish an otherwise awe-inspiring, apocalyptic odyssey.

Written with tremendous cogitation and intelligence, Oil favours slow but rewarding build up over thrill-a-minute entertainment. This initial start may test a viewer’s resolve, but as the narrative progresses across an extended running time, the audience is amply rewarded with tremendous hard-hitting drama that forces them to contemplate the very framework of our society and identity. The ultimate question: is there an end to our rapacious plundering of this planet? If not, which planet is next?

 

David Hughes

Oil is at the Almeida Theatre from 7^th October until 26^th November 2016, for more information or to book visit here.