ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to answer Amitav Ghosh’s call for the development of new aesthetic forms by focusing on how theatrical performance puts the complexities of materiality onstage. It offers an analysis of Ella Hickson’s 2016Oil as an example of the petrofiction that Ghosh was searching for in the 1990s. Hickson’s play spans the time frame of the Anthropocene from the 1850s to the present, and interweaves the history of the carbon economy with that of female emancipation and colonial history. Oil itself turns into a medium in Hickson, exemplifying what Stephanie LeMenager has identified as modern media’s indebtedness to petroleum energy. In doing so, her play exemplifies how questions of gender, ecology and colonialism come to bear on the performing environments of the Anthropocene. Hickson, alongside other contemporary British playwrights, develops a dramaturgy for exploring what Ghosh identified as the unthinkable relationalities that mark contemporary ecologies.
