The Bronze Age. The Iron Age. The Age of Oil.
The Stone Age didn’t end for want of stones.
Oil follows the lives of one woman and her daughter in an epic, hurtling collision of empire, history and family.
Ella Hickson’s explosive play drills deep into the world’s relationship with this finite resource. It is ‘the single most gloriously audacious piece of playwriting of the last few years’ Evening Standard.
Oil premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2016, in a production directed by Carrie Cracknell and starring Anne-Marie Duff.
‘Hugely imaginative… I can’t get it out of my mind’
— Independent
‘Domestic drama written on the largest canvas… sharp, witty, incisive writing… the dialectics Hickson crams into simple, domestic settings and relatable, human characters is utterly gripping; arguments about justice, colonialism, capitalism and the human condition are wielded with deftness and articulacy’
— Exeunt Magazine
‘Highly intelligent and bursting with predictions of the path we are leading each other down’
— A Younger Theatre
‘bold, playful and scorchingly ambitious… Hickson suspends the normal rules of realism to pursue big ideas… a remarkable play that… contains one of the best theatrical mother-daughter relationships of recent years’
— Guardian
‘An audacious epic… a huge, ambitious study of co-dependency: mother and daughter, man and machine, east and west, Britain and empire’
— Time Out
‘An audacious and craftily self-referential piece, which mixes prickly humour with a mischievous intelligence’
— Evening Standard
