Ella Hickson’s new play analyses our relationship with oil using the sketch format. First, there’s a candlelit soap opera set in Cornwall, in 1889, with a lot of ooh-arr bumpkins firing witless insults at each other. Next, a bizarre Persian scene, set in 1908, where a Scottish footman (who uses the celebrated Edwardian colloquialism ‘OK’) rescues a ditzy waitress from a sex-maniac serving in the British army. Then we move to Hampstead, in 1970, where a female oil magnate is visited by a Libyan diplomat seeking to nationalise her wells by waving documents at her, in her kitchen, while teenage kids pop in and out performing oral sex on each other. (This is one of the most disorganised pieces of stage writing I’ve ever witnessed.)
The next sketch is openly contradictory. The script identifies the location as ‘nr Kirkuk’ and ‘outside Baghdad’, although the cities are 236 km distant from one another. The year is 2021. We watch as a pair of querulous lesbians, one English, one Arabic, are confronted by the English girl’s bad-tempered mum. Finally, we’re in a post-apocalyptic world where two fat waffling grannies are sold a cold-fusion device by a shifty Chinawoman. That’s it.
Can anything be salvaged from this ziggurat of bilge? Certainly Hickson has a flair for drawing icy, proud domineering characters who treat conversation as a game of judgmental one-upmanship. But levity and warmth are alien to her. Just occasionally a sliver of excellence emerges. ‘You’re a pebble from Surbiton,’ says a narky mum, crushingly, to a teenage git. The mouthy footman in scene two is silenced by the observation that self-righteousness is a hallmark of political impotence. But these are pretty meagre gleanings from three hours of dialogue, most of which seems to have passed unedited from the keyboard to the script.
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