“I had a real thirst for a big subject. Little did I know [that] oil is a very big subject,” said the celebrated British playwright Ella Hickson in a 2016 interview about her new play Oil. “I wanted to wrestle with the sort of geopolitics of now … We’re running out of things – what’s our responsibility to the future?”
These questions remain just as pressing in Australia in 2023, where a gripping new production has been staged by the Sydney Theatre Company. Oil has an unusual and ambitious timeline – 162 years – as it follows the lives of May Singer (Brooke Satchwell) and her daughter Amy (Charlotte Friels) across five distinct moments in the “Age of Oil”. In five parts, we move through Cornwall in 1889, Tehran in 1908, Hampstead in 1970, Baghdad in 2021 and, finally, return to Cornwall in 2051.
