Oil cultures, world drama and contemporaneity: Questions of time, space and form in Ella Hickson’s Oil

Abstract

Described variously as “the machine of destiny,” “the mediator of futurity”, and “the most powerful fuel and versatile substance ever discovered,” oil is unanimously recognized as the ubiquitous, yet paradoxically invisible, commodity of modern global economy and history. However, scant critical attention has hitherto been paid to the question of oil and oil culture in the context of contemporary Anglo-American drama. Ella Hickson’s Oil is one of the first works that takes oil and its implications as its sustained focal point. This essay ponders and probes the epistemic, ethical, aesthetic and ontological facets of oil as they feature in Hickson’s Oil. This essay is primarily concerned with the questions of dramatic form (as a genealogical account and dialectical register of content), petro-modern subjectivity, and history. Its crux is a demonstration of Hickson's Oil as a "worlded" play, along with the manner Hickson depicts the age of oil to be capitalogenic - thereby presenting it to belong to a capitalocene rather than an Anthropocene. This task entails not only the exploration of the treatment of space and time in the play, but also of the logic of connection between various spaces and times across the historical-geographical scope which the play encompasses and spans. It also involves a scrutiny of the pivotal formal components and structural logic of Hickson’s Oil. To effectively characterize the non-naturalistic implications and features of the “worlded form” in Oil, I will draw on a cluster of intertwined concepts, including allegory, petro-magic realism, Trauerspiel, and Uchronia.

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