The Price of Oil: New season of Radio 4 plays explores the history of oil

Nicolas Kent's series of seven new dramas follow the politics, power and corruption behind the oil that has shaped the modern world

In the 150 years since the emergence of the modern petroleum industry, oil has saturated cultures and shaped how billions of people live. It's driven dreams of power and wealth, transformed economies, fuelled our transport, made our plastics, sent us to war, polluted our planet and could end all our days with climate change. It's remarkable then, in this Age of Oil, that it's been so little represented in fiction, and especially theatre.

"Oil is so woven into our lives," says Nicolas Kent, the former director of the Tricycle theatre in north London, who has struck a gusher with a series - devised with others - of seven separate radio plays to run every day for a week on BBC Radio 4. "Oil has made so many people rich - the Nobels, the Gulbenkians, the Rockefellers. It has made our age," he says.