Oil, Black Swan State Theatre Company •
Heath Ledger Theatre, 9 November 2022 •

A big thank you, Black Swan State Theatre Company, for bringing Oil to Perth. Not only does Ella Hickson’s play have the required amount of intellectual substance, but it is filled with biting, hard hitting and funny dialogue. 

The award-winning British playwright courageously tackles subjects in Oil that would make Greta Thunberg proud: the energy crisis, its impact on the environment, and the consequences of acquisitive colonisation (although Thunberg hasn’t quite got to that one yet). Hickson entwines these with the more down-to-earth problem of a toxic mother-daughter relationship.      

The play spans centuries in a skillfully constructed plot, which opens with the pregnant protagonist, May, living with her husband Joss and his motley family in bleak, 19th century Cornwall. It then moves to Tehran, the 1970s, the war-like present and, finally, the oil-less future in which the Chinese “own” the Moon. Hickson has a wicked and prescient sense of humour, for this is not unimaginable.  

The impact of each scene builds up nicely, with only the last part losing its dramatic edge somewhat as Hickson brings things full circle for the aging May. 

One of the play’s most telling moments is in the 1970s, where May is now the CEO of an oil company and living in a flat in Hampstead. Accosted there by a Libyan representative wanting to reclaim the country’s oil rights, May lectures him like a recalcitrant teenager while trying to calm her own teenage daughter, Amy, who’s flaunting her newly acquired lover, Nate. May tells Amy that Nate is a mere “pebble from Surbiton” and dismisses Amy’s protestations when he is sent packing, proclaiming it is her job to “protect her future from the passions of the present”. 

And thereby hangs the tale of Oil. May stoically follows this mantra, while Amy revolts and becomes an environmental activist. Alongside, angry, oil-rich countries deprived by outside usurpers of control of their own resources against the subjugation that is their future. 

The superb lighting design (Matthew Marshall), appealing set (Zoe Atkinson) and evocative music (Melanie Robinson) capture each era, especially the opening scene with its bleak Cornish hardship and the incessant wind howling outside. In one vivid moment in their sparse, gloomy stone kitchen, the family sit alongside each other at the table like a tableau from The Last Supper, after they have refused (due to a sense of destiny) a stranger’s offer of the first kerosene lamp. This is what makes May, lamp in hand, leave her husband Joss to have their baby elsewhere, and start her trek across the centuries. 

Director Adam Mitchell, apart from a slight loss of edge and pace in the Tehran scene, has done a great job. Atkinson’s set is, as usual, captivating and clever, and the cast is excellent. Special mention to Michael Abercromby as Joss, whose stolid, handsome, Cornish presence as occasional narrator reminds us of what May has lost, and Polly Low as his puritan mother, caustic and as convinced as May that she knows best.   

But what adds manna to this absorbing Black Swan production are the performances of Hayley McElhinney (May) and Abbey Morgan (Amy.)  

Like all good playwrights, Hickson has created a contradictory complex character in May, once weak with sensual longing for her husband, now cold and unflinching in the loneliness of her solitude. McElhinney does full justice to this demanding role. As does Morgan, capturing Amy’s self-serving fervour when she’s moved to continue her activism in the desert. After castigating the impoverished native Amina (Violette Ayad) for accepting a bribe and then refusing to go home with her mother, she asks, without irony, for a lift – in her mother’s oil-driven car. 

Oil is quality written – and performed – theatre. I can’t recommend it enough.  

Oil is at Heath Ledger Theatre until 27 November 2022.

Pictured top: The story begins in Cornwall with the arrival of a kerosene lamp. Photo: Daniel J Grant