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The true cost of ‘black gold’
MAYER WAKEFIELD recommends a sharply nuanced drama on generations subjugated by oil exploitation

Oil
Almeida Theatre
London N1
4/5

NO WONDER it took Ella Hickson over six years to write Oil.

Her exploration of Britain’s relationship with the black gold is so wide in scope that, in just under three hours, Hickson guides her audience from Cornwall in 1889 to a bleak, mid-21st-century dystopian Britain via Persia, Libya and beyond.

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