Blood Gold and Oil
Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London N6

BLOOD Gold and Oil currently at the Gatehouse is a play laden with passion. It is also redolent of deep personal commitment and forensic diligence on the part of skilled playwright Jan Woolf.

The drama sets out with a difficult task: first to penetrate layer upon layer of one man’s psyche and reach his inner self; second and simultaneously, to draw us into one mighty struggle that shapes our present and casts a pall over our past. 

The man in question is TE Lawrence, known to most as Lawrence of Arabia; the focus the Arab Revolt of 1916-18 in which British imperialists betrayed their willing allies and created the fractured and conflicted Arab world we know today.   

Lawrence, we are shown, is a man of many facets. Most abiding, though, it seems, is his haunting guilt.

For this, his spirit lives on though his body is long dead, and we find him, at the start of the play, desperate to unburden his soul, his urgency exacerbated by the knowledge that his own persona has been supplanted in the public mind by the glamorous Peter O’Toole in the widely applauded film. 

By Lawrence’s own admission, he has become a myth and not a legend: an imaginative construct in a world of fantasy and not the man of singular charisma who communed with the Bedouin on equal terms, honed the model for modern guerilla warfare and shaped our future. 

He appears on stage as a living exhibit in a museum of artefacts being lovingly assembled by the other two characters in the play. 

Sometimes the density of detail in this piece and the sheer historical scale of the core content serves to overawe the audience rather than emotionally involve them.

It’s clear that the writer, like the archaeologist, has unearthed a wealth of treasures so that the play is in danger of becoming an exhibit in its own right: a display of superior knowledge where the political aim is sure.

The characters, too, seem occasionally too firmly constructed, as though there to serve the argument rather than to drive the action and let the drama breathe. 

But director Isaac Bernier-Doyle brings us a production that is as coherent as it is heartfelt. And the actors’ performances raise the game. 

Douglas Clarke-Wood credibly inhabits the legendary Lawrence with persuasive charm and tortured soul, easily capturing the natural magnetism of a man who commands any stage.

Suzanna Hamilton, as museum curator, brings us the purposeful passion of the devotee, while Mascuud Dahir, the Iraqi-born museum assistant, pours out the heartbreak of his country to us with fierce and penetrating fervour. 

This is a profound and serious play where politics and psychology, authenticity and fable, artefacts and abstractions combine to expose a bitter truth to a largely ill-informed British public.

And the supremely articulate dialogue of the multitalented Woolf is, in itself, a recommendation, not to mention the author’s own powerful portrait of this hugely influential man. 

This is vitally relevant subject matter and nourishment for a discerning audience. 

Until April 30. Box office: (020) 8340-3488, upstairsatthegatehouse.com.