Writer
Ella Hickson
Director
Carrie Cracknell
Set and Costume Design
Vicki Mortimer
Lighting Design
Lucy Carter
Associate Lighting Designer
Max Narula
Photographer
Miles Aldridge
This play explored the history and our relationship to Oil, a finite resource.
The program notes read : The Stone Age, The Bronze Age. The Iron Age. The Age of Oil. The Stone age didn’t end for the want of stones. One woman and her daughter. What do you do when you know its going to run out.
Lucy lit each scene with the source available when the period the scene was set. So candles in late 1800’s gets replaced by an Oil lamp, and electric light replaces that, and then harsh fluorescent light energy for the 1970’s kitchen scene.
It was exciting to really chart the changes and overuse of our energy sources through the lighting design for this production.
You could steer your way through OIL by Lucy Carter's lighting alone. Ella Hicksons new play starts in 1899 in Cornwall with one of the darkest ever of scenes: a family crouched around candles in hostility. It becomes a beautiful recreation of a Georges de la Tour painting when a lamp replaces the candles. It moves into stately globes of light for a banquet scene in Persia. It turns harsh and unforgiving in the 1970's. And ends - in the future - in a world of diminishing illumination: a lunar light.
Susannah Clapp
The Guardian - 23rd Oct 2016
