For a while now, playwright Ella Hickson has been beyond merely “promising” yet still short of really making her mark. Her latest, some six years in the writing, is one of those vast, sprawling epics whose reach is almost foredoomed to exceed its grasp but which is nevertheless admirable for achieving as much as it does.

Oil is partly about the relationship between energy and geopolitics, in particular imperialist exploitation. Yet it is also about how women move in such a world, and in particular about mother/daughter relationships. May and her daughter Amy progress, in five scenes set across the northern hemisphere and bridged with slide montages and performance poetry, from the 1880s to the 2050s, yet as each scene moves forward decades, they age only years. This distorted time-scheme recalls Caryl Churchill’s equally audacious breakthrough play Cloud Nine. The alter-ego-ish names May and Amy echo Beckett’s Footfalls, and – as I begin to sound like a TV wine-taster – I’m also getting top-notes of Zinnie Harris as regards general ambition, scope and register.

The kangaroo-jumping chronology means that we have to repeatedly re-assess the particular relationships in each scene, so that we paradoxically turn aside and instead focus on the thematic constants. It is easiest to see how the macro and micro levels interact in the third scene, being the one closest to home: set in Hampstead in 1970, it shows May trying to control the currently-teenaged Amy’s life in much the same way as she is attempting, in her current incarnation as an oil company executive, to deny the new Libyan regime of Gaddafi its autonomy concerning its oil industry.

Anne-Marie Duff does a fine job of finding and maintaining a continuity of character in May through these radically diverse contexts, but Yolanda Kettle as Amy, from a slow start (she does not become a substantive personality until the third scene) is not far behind her. Carrie Cracknell’s staging likewise strikes a canny balance between naturalism and abstraction.

I can’t help but feel that Hickson’s own development is as much a determinant of this play as any of the strains of its content. In terms of either dimension, Oil makes a strong argument but can’t hope to put its case beyond question.

Written for the Financial Times.