‘The global choir of the dead and living turning into oil’: the world dramas of oil in Iran and beyond, the infrastructural vision in Amir Gudarzi’s Wonderwomb

Whilst the studies of the representations of oil in works of world drama have been proliferating recently, there has been a dearth of engagement with one of the earliest and most salient sites of oil extraction in the world: Iran. This essay is an attempt to fill this lacuna. It explores one of the most complex dramatic representations of oil in a recent play: Wonderwomb by Amir Gudarzi. The thrust of the argument here is that Wonderwomb evinces an infrastructural vision. First, it will be demonstrated how the play’s infrastructural vision is discernible in its world-ecological critique of the discourse of the Anthropocene, its depiction of the multi-scalar nature of oil, and its contradictions, along with its act of cognitive-mapping of the contemporary oil-driven Capitalocene. Finally, it will argue Wonderwomb’s dramatic aesthetics reveal how its formal features – montage, post-dramatic form, irony – express its multiscalar ecological and ontological vision.