“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.
There’s surrealism at play here (the characters’ lifespans defy logic) and the transitions from one part to the next are dream-like too: light-touch changes in set pieces, costumes and lighting, accompanied by a narrative poem alluding to the passage of time.
Oil opens at the Singer family farm in 1889. The water troughs are frozen over, the sheep are “gasping” with thirst. May Singer has spent the day trying to break through the ice with her bare hands; her body is aching from hard work and the early stages of pregnancy. Her husband, Joss (Josh McConville), has been splitting wet logs.
When the extended Singer family gathers for dinner, they shiver in the thin glow of candlelight. There is an undertow of panic, which starts to tip towards violence. Everyone is desperately hungry and cold. Then there’s a knock at the door: a stranger carrying a kerosene lamp.
“This here miracle is kerosene,” says William Whitcomb (Callan Colley), an American salesman. Whitcomb’s pitch is slick and appealing: “It’s natural,” he says. “It creates much more heat than whale lamps or wood, it’s hotter than coal.” The family are suspicious of the lamp, which offers astonishing heat and light. It’s soon revealed that Whitcomb wishes to buy the farm, so that he can begin importing and distributing oil across the country.
May makes a decision then, which will define her family’s life. We see the ramifications begin to unfold when we meet her again in Tehran, 1908: the British Admiralty are wining and dining locals with the intent of exploiting the region’s natural resources. May is working as a servant, trying to mind her daughter, Amy, who is now eight years old.
Over the proceeding years, May and Amy’s relationship strains with shifting power and expectations; it is mired with cruel slights and freighted with memory. Satchwell and Friels are magnetic in their STC debuts, bringing savage wit, rage and tender hope to the dialogue, anchoring the play’s unusual architecture during its enormous leaps through space and time.
In 1970, May is now CEO of an international oil company. Amy is a teenager, enjoying the trappings of the fortune her mother amassed. Yet the pair bicker endlessly. Amy is troubled by May’s career and the climate impact of fossil fuels. As the Libyan revolution unfolds, May justifies her line of work with plain force: “We inherited an empire. We are defending a superpower. I will not leave my child with less than I was given. I have worked too hard.”
Amy doesn’t get away unscathed either. In the penultimate act, set in 2021, she has spent three years living in Iraq “to atone” for her mother’s acts of empire, as if her simple presence in the desert is enough. Iraqi woman Aminah (Violette Ayad) calls out the white saviour mentality: “You think we’re all illiterate and on our knees with our long suffering?”
While May and Amy’s views about fossil fuels diverge, their underlying approach to the subject is strikingly similar: paternalistic, self-serving and fuelled by an aggrieved righteousness. Time and time again, the play demonstrates the immense complexity – and brutal consequence – of our relationship to oil.
The pair stay tightly bound until 2051. By now, the world has depleted its reserves of oil. They are cold and hungry, just like May was in 1889 – a crooked circularity reflected in their names: “May” and “Amy” differ slightly, but are made of the same parts.
Oil is a complex play to stage, but brilliantly managed by the director, Paige Rattray, and the set designer, Emma White. Each period feels vital and fully realised, from the dank interior of the Singers’ cottage to the lavish feasts hosted by the British military in Tehran a gleaming 1970s kitchen, burning tyres in Baghdad and finally a freezing lounge room in 2051.
But the most arresting visual choice is perhaps the simplest. Throughout the play, the stage is covered in thick black sand that wears the marks of characters as they move through the space. Everyone, regardless of who they are and what they believe in, leaves an impression on the earth that outlasts them – and bearing witness to those marks being made, the audience becomes complicit too.
Oil runs at the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 until 16 December
