“You Can’t Be Here”: The Playwriting Dialectic in Ella Hickson’s <i>Oil</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2016, Ella Hickson’s play Oil uses an elongated time span to show the growth in global dependence on oil since the nineteenth century and to speculate on its future consequences. Hickson’s play is formally influenced by the disrupted-time plays of Caryl Churchill. The present article, however, makes the case for another playwriting influence: that of George Bernard Shaw, whose discussion plays Oil comes to resemble in its third and fourth parts. Adopting the language Shaw uses in his critical study The Quintessence of Ibsenism, the article argues that Oil stages, in its dramaturgy, a dialectical struggle between the Shavian and Churchillian traditions. Viewed in this light, Hickson’s next play, The Writer, can be read as a synthesis of Oil’s formal experimentation and the critical reaction to it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".