
JOE: You do not Frack, Hal, you explore for shale gas. You extract shale gas. You provide shale gas. You use unconventional extraction techniques. You employ enhanced methodology. You use stimulation techniques. You mine non-conventional hydro-carbons. But you do not frack.
HAL: Why not?
JOE: It’s just a terrible word to be associated with. Partly because it’s got that hard aggressive ‘k’ sound in it. As in suck. Muck. Kick. Dick. Stick. Knock. Cock. Nasty in-yer-face k-words. But mainly because it sounds like fuck. And we do not want to sound like fuck, do we?
Thus do we find ourselves in the world of Alistair Beaton’s Fracked! or, Please Don’t Mention the F-Word, a satirical play in which Hal (Michael Simkins), company director and traditional oil man, seeks to frack his way across England’s green and pleasant land.
Joe is, as you might have gathered, a master of spin, a Machiavellian PR man who is more than passingly reminiscent of The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker. Despite their shared belief in the transformative power of language, at least in the public sphere, theirs is a private world crammed with compulsive obscenity. If “Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off” was Tucker’s most enduring phrase, Joe makes up in quantity what he lacks in syntactical elasticity: “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Chased by a fucking bull, can you believe it? Fucking outrageous. The fucking thing should be shot. The fucking farmer too. Not to mention Elizabeth fucking Blackwood, and her fucking husband, who set me up, I am sure they set me up.”
Read full review at Exeunt Magazine here