“You Can’t Be Here”: The Playwriting Dialectic in Ella Hickson’s Oil

Abstract

Premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2016, Ella Hickson’s play Oil uses an elongated time span to show the growth in global dependence on oil since the nineteenth century and to speculate on its future consequences. Hickson’s play is formally influenced by the disrupted-time plays of Caryl Churchill. The present article, however, makes the case for another playwriting influence: that of George Bernard Shaw, whose discussion plays Oil comes to resemble in its third and fourth parts. Adopting the language Shaw uses in his critical study The Quintessence of Ibsenism, the article argues that Oil stages, in its dramaturgy, a dialectical struggle between the Shavian and Churchillian traditions. Viewed in this light, Hickson’s next play, The Writer, can be read as a synthesis of Oil’s formal experimentation and the critical reaction to it.