Ziggurat of bilge

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.