Review: BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO, Young Vic Theatre
Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer-nominated play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, an established and unique piece of modern war-theatre, finds a new clarity under Omar Elerian’s direction. He leans into the play’s surrealism and allows the absurdity of the premise to sit alongside the brutality of its reality.
Set in Baghdad, after the fall of Saddam Hussein in the early 2000s, the city is unstable and full of ghostlike memories a purgatory for the living and the dead in many ways. In the middle of this chaos, we meet a Tiger (Katherine Hunter), hungry and restless after being abandoned in a bombed zoo. She encounters two American Marines (Arinzé Keneand Patrick Gibson), but when one tries to feed the starving tiger, she mauls his hand off. And so, we begin…. Each character in this play carries their own ghosts and guilt which takes them into a dark, comic, metaphysical tangle of revenge, remorse, and the desperate search for meaning in a landscape where morality has collapsed. Gold-plated relics of the regime, fractured loyalties, and the absurd logic of war bind these characters together in ways none of them can fully reckon with.
The existential questions of, who is “good” in war, what motives the need to survive, and whether our origins determine our fate, take on a painful presence when filtered through the observations of a creature who sees everything and understands nothing in the way humans hope. How does this tiger, a being born a hunter, contemplate remorse? The perspective is poetic, strange, and emotionally affecting. Hunter who is stepping in for the unwell David Threlfall, injects an on-the-seat-of-your-pants energy and a genuine urgency to make this text speak to a current audience due to the speed in which she has likely learnt the part and delivery. Her Tiger is dry, cutting, and sardonic, slicing through moments of intensity while allowing the humour and bizarreness of the premise to breathe.
The rest of the cast are equally impressive. Kene as Kev, unravelles brilliantly as he watches his fantasies of heroism collapse in on themselves landing him in a mentally unstable place. Gibson as Tom finds the state of a soldier finds the balance between fear and indoctrinated brutality yet with anunderlining softness peeking through. Musa (Ammar Haj Ahmad), as the translator for the Americans, navigating impossible loyalties, is both caring and self-serving in his attempts to extinguish a past that hunts him providing a pathos to a flawed man. Literally disintegrating into sand as the isolated Leper woman, Hala Omran’s haunting, Arabicsong carves out a moment of stillness that settles profoundly, but necessarily uneasily, in the space.
There are moments of real gore and some sharply designed sequences that frame this fractured world with confidence. At points some choices drift into what feels like improvised territory and not every beat lands, but there’s a certain charm in that rawness, a looseness that suits a play already teetering between the surreal and the painfully human.
Elena Peña’s sound design roots the work firmly in the early 2000s of American ego while Rajha Shakiry’s set shifts between the real and the symbolic well, capturing the desert landscape of Iran as well as the crumbling remains of a city.Elerian directs with a sure hand, keeping the tension in the right places and allowing moments of tenderness to land amidst the carnage.
Precarious but compelling. This is a history uncomfortably close, staged at what feels like the right time. A play that reminds us of the past isn’t finished with us, and neither are the questions we’d prefer not to ask.
**** Four stars
Reviewed by: Stephanie Osztreicher
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo plays at London’s Young Vic Theatre until 31 January, with further info via the link below…
https://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/bengal-tiger-the-baghdad-zoo
Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz