

In the 150 years since the emergence of the modern petroleum industry, oil has saturated cultures and shaped how billions of people live. It’s driven dreams of power and wealth, transformed economies, fuelled our transport, made our plastics, sent us to war, polluted our planet and could end all our days with climate change. It’s remarkable then, in this Age of Oil, that it’s been so little represented in fiction, and especially theatre.

“Oil is so woven into our lives,” says Nicolas Kent, the former director of the Tricycle theatre in north London, who has struck a gusher with a series - devised with others - of seven separate radio plays to run every day for a week on BBC Radio 4. “Oil has made so many people rich - the Nobels, the Gulbenkians, the Rockefellers. It has made our age,” he says.

The seven - a nod possibly to the seven oil companies which formed the infamous “Consortium for Iran” cartel which dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s – switch from Alaska to Iran by way of Nigeria, Kuwait, Iraq and Britain. They are linked by corruption, politics and history.

The season opens with Stand Firm, You Cads! one of three dramas written by Jonathan Myerson, based on the fateful day in 1951 when new Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Persian Oil Company [later to become BP] cancelling the 60-year concession which had been signed in 1901 by the then Shah. From that significant moment on, developing countries understood they could nationalise their oil and force the major Western oil companies out.

“I think so few people know of Mossadegh, the genesis of BP and our whole relationship with Iran,” says Kent. “Tony Blair famously did not know who he was and that tells the whole story of oil in the post-war era. After mass demonstrations and a CIA-backed coup, Mossadegh was unseated and the West got its oil back. But the genie was out of the bottle.”



Nicolas Kent: ‘I think oil was seen as a blessing until the 1960s and 70s. It was wondrous ... But now it is a total curse.” Photograph: Alastair Muir/REX Shutterstock

Kent devises unashamedly factual and political theatre. His reconstruction of the Scott inquiry into the arms to Iraq affair, and his staging of verbatim extracts from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly as well as Srebrenica and extracts from the Nuremberg war crime trials were all remarkable stage hits in the 1990s.

The seven plays mostly centre on real events. Nigerian writer Rex Obano bases his drama on Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian author judicially murdered by his government in 1994 for standing up against Shell’s oil pollution in the Niger delta. “The Ogoni people’s campaign against the environmental degradation of their land by the oil industry begins to crystallise into a mass movement,” says Obano.

Equally, Looking For Billy by Nigel Williams takes listeners up Alaska’s Haul Road to the Arctic Sea at the time when the US was trying to wean itself off Middle East oil. As a private detective sets out to investigate protests against the pipeline, the effect that oil discovery has had on the indigenous Inupiat people begins to emerge.

“The idea of a series of plays has taken four years to fruition. I wanted to do it in a theatre and to go right back to the barons in 14th-century England when the price of oil rocketed for the first time. The BBC wanted them all to be set post world war two,” he says.



“I think oil was seen as a blessing until the 1960s and 70s. It was wondrous. It gave people freedom, created city states like Dubai and gave power. It’s dictated our politics to a great extent. It won us world war two, it’s been of strategic importance. But now it is a total curse,” he says

The last play is a comedy by Tamsin Ogleby. Set in 2045 it imagines a father-and-son energy company struggling with the new economics of the oil market. The wells are running dry in Turkmenistan, the Chinese are fighting to frack under Lytham St Annes, and the young man is urging his father to get out of oil for good.

With the world’s largest car company in meltdown this week, oil bumping along at some of its lowest prices for years and all the world’s countries preparing to agree to cut back on fossil fuel emissions, seven plays about the history of oil seem barely enough.