World dramas of oil in Iran

Whilst there has been an upsurge of interest in environmental and ecological issues in contemporary Iranian theatre, within the annals of modern and contemporary Iranian drama, few works have delved into the materiality of oil. This article is the first to fill this lacuna. <br/><br/>Taking the Iranian petroleumscape as its focal point, this article probes the dramatic representation of oil in a recent play Wonderwomb (2021) by Amir Gudarzi. Elaborating on the ecological, psychological, economic and socio-cultural effects of the extraction, production and consumption of oil in Iran over the course of the ‘long twentieth century’, the thrust of the argument here is that Wonderwomb evinces what I call an infrastructural vision. Accordingly, this essay pursues a threefold argument. First, it will delineate how the play’s infrastructural vision is primarily reflected in its world-ecological critique of the discourse of the Anthropocene. Second, it will demonstrate how this infrastructural vision manifests itself in its recognition of the manifold nature of oil in contemporary petroculture: oil as a cultural signifier, a social agent, a commodity, a national icon, a traumatic object of desire and also as a ‘hyperobject’ – an object that disturbs normative notions of space, time, and scale. Third, it will scrutinize the dramatic aesthetics informing Wonderwomb in order to show how its formal features – particularly its use of montage – expresses the complexity of its ecological and psychological vision. <br/><br/>