You could steer your way through Oil by Lucy Carter’s lighting alone. Ella Hickson’s new play starts in 1899 in Cornwall with one of the darkest ever of scenes: a family crouched around candles in hostility. It becomes a beautiful recreation of a Georges de la Tour painting when a lamp replaces the candles. It moves into stately globes of light for a banquet scene in Persia. It turns harsh and unforgiving in the 1970s. And ends – in the future – in a world of diminishing illumination: a lunar light.
This is part of the beautiful economy of Carrie Cracknell’s production. It suggests at a stroke the epic quality of Hickson’s play as well as its intimacy. It evokes particular epochs. It focuses attention on the fuel that is the trigger of its plot. And it suggests the biblical parable that runs beneath it: that of the wise and foolish virgins, only some of whom have oil for their lamps.
Hickson’s main concern is rather different. She draws parallels between different conquests and colonisations. Men swooping on women. British imperialists exploiting – or is it advising – poorer countries. Mothers controlling – or are they subtly enabling – their daughters. I love the contentiousness of this: there is no coasting on liberal attitudes. But it would be a more subtle play if it were not so clearly arguing a case. And if it did not have a droning narrator between scenes. Still, it is embodied here to the hilt. Especially in Anne-Marie Duff’s shark-fin performance. She swims along the line between ruthlessness and sensitivity. She looks as if she has her own fuel supply. Lit up.
