Amir Gudarzi was born in Iran in 1986 during the Iran-Iraq war.
He later graduated at the only school for theatre in the country at that time and studied scenic writing in Tehran. Due to censorship, his plays were only shown in private circles. On the side, he wrote scripts for TV-series and feature films. Since 2009, Gudarzi has lived in involuntary exile in Vienna, Austria, where he studied theatre, film and media studies.
In 2017, he won the exil-DramatikerInnenpreis for his play Between Us and Them Lies … In 2018 he was nominated for the Austrian Hans-Gratzer scholarship of Schauspielhaus Wien, his play Arash//Heimkehrer premiered in Vienna and his performance The Knowledge Tree was shown in Jerusalem. In 2019 Gudarzi’s play The Assassin’s Castle was invited to the Berlin Stückemarkt. In 2020 Jelly man – The Future in between my Fingers premiered in Vienna and his piece Who cut the cake was shown in London’s Royal Court Theatre as part of the Living Newspaper project.
Gudarzi is nominated for the Austrian Retzhofer drama price 2021 with his play Wonderwomb and received numerous drama and literary scholarships, including 2018-2020 from the Austrian Chancellery and 2020/2021 from the Literary Colloquium Berlin. Amir
Gudarzi lives in Vienna and is working on his debut novel.
The Assassin’s Castle
It is a historical kaleidoscope in which the centuries tumble over each other like different voices. Two sphinxes oversee the events in which speaking mountains meet Mongolian armies, a refugee receives unexpected help, a truck driver makes the acquaintance of three self-confident sex workers. In between, Marco Polo tries to pave himself a way to the East and tourist choirs are stuck in traffic jams on the motorway.
It is almost to be expected that none of this can have a happy ending. The piece deals with the history of a migration to Europe and addresses the fata morgana that Europe, as a place of longing, turns out to be in the course of the piece. It’s a dance of death, a lament.
Wonderwomb
A cemetery en route on the water. An oil tanker somewhere in the Persian or Arabian Gulf. A chorus of dead animals turned to oil is conversing. Conversations are also held on the stock exchanges. Many buy oil stocks as if they know something. An oil tanker is attacked and the price of oil soars.
Stories about: 1 cosmetic products, 2 chewing gum, 3 cars, 4 clothes, 5 candles,
6 grill lighter, 7 Tupperware jars, 8 mattresses, 9 bikini, 10 cleaning supplies.
All of these products are made from oil; this oil comes from the Middle East. The oil brought skyscrapers to Doha and Dubai, but war and exploitation to other countries. Doha and Dubai will either be submerged in water or uninhabitable due to the heat by the end of the century.
People from these countries in the Middle East flee and live elsewhere as refugees. The money that the oil is supposed to bring for them is used by their governments in some other murky way. War is omnipresent and increases the price of oil. Who would have expected that the death of an Iranian through American drones would be raising the price of oil by a few dollars a barrel?
Wonderwomb draws a world around the market economy component of oil, the resulting internal and external destruction, as well as the power struggles over the black gold, always in relation to the Western world and its economic interests.
