Review Oil

Oil

by Ella Hickson

Cold Comfort Farm

https://www.almeida.co.uk

In the week  President Buhari of Nigeria (a petroleum nation) said his wife belonged "to my kitchen", we filled our tank and drove to see Ella Hickson's take on the oil industry. Indeed Oil marries the growth of our dependence on this fossil fuel with the emancipation of women.

At its centre is May (Anne-Marie Duff) . We follow her progress over more than a century, seeking not so much a room, but an energy resource, of her own. 

Maybe it is a magical mystery tour of a female Flying Dutchman fuelled by oil before it becomes a dwindling resource. Maybe it is more a psychological tour of a woman's mind and life with designer Vicki Mortimer, lighting by Lucy Carter and sound by Peter Rice at times subtly indicating electrical synapses of the brain.

We first encounter May in 1889 as the pregnant wife who has married into a Devon farming family labouring on the land from sunrise to sunset, constantly needing to chop wood for fuel with candlelight a nighttime luxury.

This freezing and spartan existence is interrupted by the arrival of a stetson-wearing American (Sam Swann). He demonstrates to them  the smelly convenience of kerosene lamps and introduces the concept of land acquisition, stubbornly refused by the family despite May's attraction to this brave new world of money, commerce and light.  It is at this point pregnant May seems to start on a journey leaping through electrical synapses of time

The play (or more accurately five shorter linked plays with the recurring characters of May and also her daughter Amy played by Yolanda Kettle), is sandwiched between two songs  an English folk song, There Were Three Ravens, and ends with Justin Bieber's Love Yourself.

There are five time shifts flagged up, three in the past: The 1880s, Britain's imperial sphere of influence in the Persian oil fields in 1908  and the formica kitchen of a (female) oil executive's Hampstead home in the 1970s, then forward to 2021 in the Iraqi desert with a British woman MP determined to bring her daughter home by hook or by crook.

Thirty years after that, it's finally back to the future at the Singer farm where oil is rationed - mother and daughter left to fend for themselves in one room barely able to afford commercially rationed oil and the cycle starting again with a new world power and salesperson with a proposed solution to all our energy problems. 

We'll make no bones about it. This is a strange one, perhaps with something in common with the Royal Court's space fantasy X. And with references, lots of references, relevant but barely integrated, the scenes sometimes feeling sketch-like.

The farming family is called Singer, maybe a gesture towards the mechanisation of women's manual labour into commerce, on machines which still needed drops of oil.  A British officer in Iran has the surname Samuel, the same as one ofthe founders of the Shell oil company.

There is also a reference to menstruation as May hired as waitress gets "blood on the napkins". And so it goes, often managing to stitch in references a few snippets of history but without knowing that history, the effect is random, in fact frustrating, for an audience member.

Even the publicity photo shows Anne-Marie Duff looking for all the world like Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle seated in a modern - er - kitchen. Presumably with all the electrical goods and the materials used to build the kitchen products, in one way or other, of oil.

It is this mash up which makes this feel like a rather clumsy attempt to tie together and mirror many magpie elements in a confused woman's mind. It seems strange for example, that in 1908 a Persian waiting woman would be paid monthly, even when paid in cash, as if she were on a modern salary paid in retrospect into a bank account.

Or that a 15-year old schoolgirl in 1970 when Libya effectively started to nationalize its oil fields talks about leaving school at 16. The school leaving age was only raised from 15 to 16 in 1972. In the last section the Singer farm of the future, when oil is scarce, is suddenly not in Devon but in Cornwall.

Maybe there is also an attempt to chart a history of literature - for example, Virginia Woolf time-travelling,  a countryside idyll imagined by Amy's 1970s' boyfriend Nate sounds like something out of Arnold Wesker's 1959 play "I'm Talking About Jerusalem"

There are a lot of "maybes" because while there are the occasional witty elements, there appears to be no heart to Oil and, although there are constant references to and attempts to foreground oil, it does not seem the main concern of the writer Ella Hickson (or dramaturge Jenny Worton).

The cast give their all and there's fluent direction by Carrie Cracknell, using video projections (Luke Halls) as well as lighting and sound to link the plays. However if confusion is one of the themes, it unfortunately is reflected in the structure of the piece.

The disparate themes feel shoehorned in rather than an artistic choice growing naturally out of the content. It did made us wonder whether it was originally conceived for the screen rather than on stage.

These are certainly women who do not stay chained to the kitchen sink, but despite a strong cast and direction, our own wells do not gush over for Oil and we give it an amber light. And TLT and her own little gas guzzler may well take up the popcorn and watch again the, albeit male-dominated, movie and Oscar-winning performance of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood based on Upton Sinclair's Oil!

Review The Deep Blue Sea

The Deep Blue Sea

By Terence Rattigan

Aftermath

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

When we say "post war" now, it really feels as if we have to define which war we're talking about. For Terence Rattigan, son of a diplomat,  an Oxford-educated history graduate and ex-RAF, there was no such ambiguity in 1952. Everybody in the western world, and some beyond, knew what it was like to be "post war".

So The Deep Blue Sea is very definitely a post Second World War play - post Battle of Britain, post the revealing to the British public of concentration camp horrors, post the judgements of the Nuremberg Trials, and, even if in the very near past, post British Empire in an austere and much depleted United Kingdom.  

Helen McCrory is Hester Collyer, who has run away from her High Court judge husband, Sir William (Peter Sullivan).  Having fled from Eaton Square, she now lives an exile from society  yet a near neighbour, apparently unknown to him, of her estranged husband, as "Mrs Page", in a Ladbroke Grove bedsit with her ex RAF lover. Freddie (Tom Burke) has struggled to make a living as a post-war test pilot, both in Canada and the UK, although he still manages somehow to pay for his rounds of drink and golf weekends at Sunningdale.

The play starts with Hester's botched attempt at suicide from an overdose and gas asphyxiation - botched because the shilling in the gas meter runs out.  She's found the following morning by fellow tenants,  Home Office employees Philip Welch (Hubert Burton) and his pregnant wife Ann (Yolanda Kettle)  -  obviously no surname pun intended  -  and her solicitous gossip of a landlady Mrs Eldon (Marion Bailey),  They call in bookie's clerk and German ex Prisoner of War Kurt Miller (Nick Fletcher) who appears to have more than a smattering of medical knowledge. 

This is an engrossing, detailed production directed by Carrie Cracknell, if somewhat held up at times by lengthy sound effects splaying like confused radio frequencies (sound: Peter Rice). At the centre is a desperate yet clear-sighted Hester, known as Hes to her husband of which more later, at the centre of the action and all the other characters swirling around her, in their various ways keeping her at arm's length. 

The bedsit, in a multi-storied set designed by Tom Scutt, filled with the shadows of adjacent tenants' rooms,  feels surreally stretched out, bathed in grayish green light. (lighting: Guy Hoare). McCrory's cut glass Hester is transfixing, with a film star glow amidst her dull surroundings. She's a conquest creating a problem which  Freddie (a dissolute with a survival instinct in Burke's equally fine performance) and his friend Jackie (Adetomiwa Edun)  realize he cannot possibly handle..  

There's little doubt that, in part, The Deep Blue Sea was inspired by the suicide of Rattigan's male lover, actor Kenny Morgan and TLT with her sporty little hatchback went in with this commonly held knowledge. But as they watched the play another uncomfortable, more than spikey parallel emerged. 

Phoned up by the Home Office couple, the judge calls Hester by the shortened nicknamed "Hes". Hes becomes more and more isolated while even her own estranged husband comforts her but seems to have no inclination to bring her back to legitimate society where he can count the Solicitor General as an old friend and entertains American judges. 

The Home Office couple are, like the landlady, solicitous but also rather thrilled by the knowledge they now have about a High Court Judge. Albeit the implications of the publiic coroner's court enquiry,  if Hester had succeeded in her attempt,  are not lost on them. 

It is Miller, as much an outcast as a struck off Nazi scientist and German  mprisoned by the Allies as an outcast as a homosexual, the latter a common interpretation of his role,  who can talk Hester out of her aggrieved attempts at suicide. The question of judgements and justice raised by the post-war Nuremberg Trials and a lifetime's limbo of life imprisonment, as in the case of Rudolf Hess, caught between those who were hanged and those imprisoned and released spoke out loud and clear to us from this production. 

This was the first production of The Deep Blue Sea we have seen with fine performances and a stunning Hester at its centre, a heroine who knows her life is descending into cheap melodrama while others can turn the page and move on. Written after the turmoil in Europe and Asia of World War II, it also, it seems to us, is a seamlessly integrated nuanced dramatic debate without attempting a glib resolution. 

But many others can judge for themselves when it is broadcast in British cinemas on September 1 and internationally on October 6. In the meantime, it's a green light from TLT and her little jalopy.