A new play from Scotland’s site-specific theatre specialists Grid Iron which investigates the most controversial industry in Scotland – oil. Read more …
Focusing on the lives of offshore workers and the choices they make to work on the industrial islands of the North Sea, Crude also travels to the Niger Delta and the Arctic Circle to look at the global impact of oil production and its human and ecological cost.
Crude traces not only the history of oil but also our huge, addicted reliance on the by-products of black gold: our cars, our aeroplanes, our plastics that surround and almost literally wrap everything we do.
Crude: an exploration of oil. Rooted in the local. Encompassing the global.
A production with big ideas but little substance.
In terms of the political intent of such an enterprise, the show's fluidity goes some way to exposing the tangled global web that is woven in order to extract money from the earth, whatever the human cost.
Crude is a show so timely in its theme, and so ambitious in scale, that it remains an unforgettable experience.
Crude is a breathtaking piece of theatre, at once alluring and appalling, raising uncomfortable truths but addressing them with intelligence, sophistication and compassion – and with a swaggering sense of self-confidence that’s a brilliant match for its subject matter.
Though the script and characterisation occasionally fall back on cliché (“oil is sexy” is a recurring mantra), the ambitious show nevertheless provides a timely reappraisal of our dysfunctional relationship with and overreliance on the “black gold”.
This makes for an overloaded, incoherent and (thanks to its choice of venue) uncomfortably cold 90 minutes of theatre.
Grid Iron’s subject is huge, and the scale of Crude‘s ambition reflects that.
Crude is undoubtedly an interesting theatrical experiment that’s definitely worth experiencing, but it’s not always “interesting” for the best of reasons.
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Grid Iron--Crude
'It's out global addiction': Scottish oil drama Crude drills down to reality.
Dundee Rep Theatre, Dundee from Saturday October 8, 2016, until Sunday October 23, 2016. A site-specific production. Buses leave from the Greenmarket carpark.. More info: www.dundeereptheatre.co.uk
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