We're dirty. We're messy. We die. That's life.

On a remote Scottish island, an estranged mother and daughter are at loggerheads over how best to save their children. While Ella fights for her son's future, her mother Karen is terrified that Ella's environmental activism will her get killed. Trapped together until one of them gives in or lashes out, it quickly becomes clear that not all mothers know best. 

Around them, at the mercy of the brutal North Sea and Mother Nature, their close-knit community is being pushed to the brink in a world which is changing too fast for them to survive.

Written by the award-winning 2015 IASH / Traverse Theatre Creative Fellow Clare Duffy and directed by Traverse Associate Director Gareth Nicholls, (Ulster American), Arctic Oil grapples with how trying to save the world could end up destroying those closest to us – and even ourselves.