Heated debate and an icy thriller
WHY IS it you think you should be warm when the sun ain’t shining?” If there is one line of dialogue that sets Ella Hickson’s hugely ambitious new play on its way, this is it.
Delivered with contempt by the hard-as-nails matriarch of a dirt-poor Cornish farm in the 19th century, it is directed at her pregnant daughterin-law May, Hickson’s rather magical, possibly immortal heroine (AnneMarie Duff) whose life span straddles at least 200 years. This is also, if predictions are correct, roughly the period the black stuff will end up dominating industry and international politics. So the big idea here is that May’s story is also the story of oil.
But in the Almeida’s comfortably air-conditioned auditorium, the matriarch’s question is really directed at us, the audience, who take for granted our right to watch this play at the perfect temperature and then drive in our oil-powered cars — or oilpowered public transport — to our our oil-heated homes. So Hickson is not only writing a history of oil, but a play about our dependence on the stuff.
After the Cornish scene, May pops up as a single mother in a series of oilrelated milestones: in the desert with her daughter Amy (Yolanda Kettle) during the British Empire’s attempt to secure access to Iranian oilfields; in the 1970s as an oil company exec with a rebellious teenager; as an MP attempting to repatriate Amy who is now an activist in Islamic Statecontrolled Iraq — right into a bleak, post-oil future.
Director Carrie Cracknell illuminates the timeline with images of war, industry and the West’s colonial past. And you can’t help but admire the ambition in tackling a subject as big and complex as oil and, even more difficult, our relationship with the fuel.
It is taking us two centuries to burn what took 150 million years to create, points out the passionately anti-West Amy to her passionately free-market mother.
But while Hickson has a decent stab at projecting what the future holds — there’s a fantastically ominous line about Chinese involvement in the new Hinckley Point nuclear power station — she doesn’t really advance the political arguments fuelled by oil. And fascinating and vital though Hickson’s exploration is, it turns out that oil as a play generates much more heated argument than it does drama.
THIS ADAPTATION of a littleknown (in this country) thriller by Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, set in snowy, 1960s Connecticut brings to mind some of the great movies of the time. A group of partygoers fight their way back to an isolated house through a raging snow storm. One is lost and dies. Did any of the survivors, including family man and lawyer Donald (Mark Strong), the dead man’s beautiful wife Mona (Elizabeth Debicki), and Donald’s watchful wife Ingrid (Hope Davis) desire his death?
Director Robert Icke brilliantly condenses the awkwardly huge Lyttleton stage by framing each scene in squares and triangles that bring to mind Meanwhile, the tension generated by Icke’s superbly performed production, well-served by David Hare’s script, is almost Hitchcockian.
There’s more style than substance here, but enough of both to highly recommend this psycho thriller.