A updated version fo the play is presented at the Riverside Studios Hampstead. 10th to 13th July 2023

Book your tickets at the Theatre website

From the Arab Revolt of World War One, a modern hero is constructed: The brilliant, flawed figure of Lawrence of Arabia. His legacy is as complex as his psyche.

A museum. Present day. A curator puts the finishing touches to her final exhibition while its subject – seemingly summoned by the passion of the archaeologist – searches for a way out.

Produced for the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, BLOOD GOLD AND OIL scrapes away at the topsoil of TE Lawrence’s continued celebrity and interrogates all that lies beneath. Was he a brilliant military commander? Certainly. A Freedom fighter? He’d definitely like to think so. An agent of British colonialism? Could be.

During the course of the play, a real living exhibition is carefully pieced together with an array of genuine World War One artefacts on loan from the National Civil War Centre in Newark and Imperial War Museum. The finds were from a 2013 archaeological dig in Jordan where playwright Jan Woolf was a writer in residence and dug the play out of the ground.