Oil and the Empire Play

Description

Ella Hickson’s Oil (Almeida Theatre, 2016) is one of the most recent in a line of contemporary British history plays that contain epic leaps in time and/or place, and that seek to tell a story over decades and centuries, frequently ending on a note of post-imperial despair. These epic history plays, I argue, can be traced back to two influential works from the end of the 1970s, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain. Both of these works draw comparisons between personal and sexual politics in the late twentieth century and the structures of imperialism and subjugation that have defined British and global history. Since then, notable examples of what has been defined as either the epic history play (Grace and Bayley, 2016), or else the time-hop history play (Poore 2018), include Loveplay by Moira Buffini, Luminosity by Nick Stafford, Harvest by Richard Bean, Victoria by David Greig, and The Wheel by Zinnie Harris.
Oil follows a young woman, May, as she leaves her home on a desolate Cornish farm at the end of the nineteenth century, and as she reappears around the world in a variety of guises, following the growth of the petrochemical industry and the twentieth century’s attendant energy crises, as well as the passing of geopolitical dominance from the British Empire to the United States. I will argue that what makes Oil distinctive in this time-hop tradition is its co-opting of another recent theatrical genre, the ‘future history’. Rather than ending in the present day, Oil takes us forward to 2051, where May and her daughter Amy are back in Cornwall once the world’s energy supply has dwindled, with Chinese technology poised to achieve global dominance, this time harvesting raw materials from the moon.

Period	14 Dec 2018
Event title	After Empire? The Contested Histories of Decolonisation, Migration and Race in Modern Britain
Event type	Conference
Location	Leeds, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International