Recuperating (from) Disposability in the Wasteocene: Recycling Lives and Plastics in Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Authors

Ryan Claycomb

Abstract

The 2015 National Theatre production of Behind the Beautiful Forevers—David Hare’s adaptation of the book by Katherine Boo—depicts the lives of a few of the 3,000+ people living in Annawadi, a slum adjacent to the Mumbai airport.  Many living in this slum—in the book, in the play, and in the actual place—live alongside a sewage pond and make their livelihood by trash-picking in the penumbra of the airport. They are capitalism’s disposable people, living in literal refuse. Boo’s (US) book and Hare’s (UK) script not only make visible the Capitalocene’s mark upon planetary stratigraphy in the form of waste but also demonstrate how waste is connected to capitalism’s exploitative global economies that lay waste to people in addition to producing material waste. Using Marco Armiero’s critical framework of the “Wasteocene,” this essay first looks at how the play’s depiction of wasting relationships register unequal damage in the geologic record as well as in the bodies of capitalism’s disposable people. The essay then considers the performance’s use of “stage trash,” recycled waste collected for the purposes of a performance, which opens up possibilities to think about how the stage’s use of both recycled material and recycled narratives create ideological ambivalences—not only “de-invisibilizing” unjust wasting relationships based on embodied othering but also recuperating both material and lives back into extractive global economies that exploited them in the first place.

Recommended Citation

Claycomb, Ryan (2026) "Recuperating (from) Disposability in the Wasteocene: Recycling Lives and Plastics in Behind the Beautiful Forevers," Comparative Drama: Vol. 59: Iss. 4, Article 1.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol59/iss4/1