If you go to a play set in the second invasion of Iraq with not unreasonable expectations of gritty realism, Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is here to confound them. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize when it first appeared in 2011 on Broadway, it has taken some time to appear on stage here and the Young Vic’s production is, in fact, its European premiere.
It could simply be that, until now, no one was brave enough to take it on. With Robin Williams appearing in the original title role as the Tiger, it would be a hard act to follow. But there are other potential hurdles here – it’s a play that is hard to define but let’s just say it’s a surreal tragi-comedy set in a war zone with metaphysical overtones. Let me just say, too, from the get-go that, in director Omar Elerian’s hands, it works.
Kathryn Hunter at the Tiger in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at the Young Vic
Our tiger is Kathryn Hunter who plays the role as part world-weary philosopher, part ageing rock chick – and this would be a remarkable performance even if she hadn’t been brought in at the last moment to replace an unwell David Threlfall. She (and she does emphasise the word) has been taken from the mangroves of the Sundarbans and deposited for 12 years in her “cell” in Baghdad Zoo that, when the Americans invade, is guarded by a couple of US marines, Tom (Patrick Gibson) and Kev (Arinze Kene) already clearly out of their depth.
You know you’re in a war zone. At times, helicopters whirr deafeningly, the stage is thrown into darkness except for torchlights that swing blindingly into the audience, voices talk over each other and in different languages. Even sitting in the stalls you sense their disorientation and the fog of war. And when Tom decides to feed the tiger and it bites off his hand, blood is added to the chaos. For Tiger, though, it’s simple – she is just doing what a tiger is meant to do. At this point, Kev shoots her dead and she becomes the first of many ghosts to stalk the scene.
Kev , though, is the only one who can see Tiger’s ghost as she searches for God and the meaning of life – to the extent of attempting vegetarianism (and failing) as a way of assuaging the sin of being a tiger. But then, she argues, if God didn’t want a creature who killed to eat, why invent tigers in the first place? Her worst crime was the death of a child but, as she points out, from a tiger’s point of view: “It wasn’t cruel. It was lunch.”
Ammar Haj Ahmad and Sayyid Aki in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at the Young Vic
The living are as lost as the dead. Tom, now fitted with a robotic hand, searches in vain for his loot (a golden gun and, most bizarrely, a golden toilet seat). Kev becomes increasingly unhinged by the ghost only he can see. Musa, their interpreter (played movingly by Ammar Haj Ahmad) had formerly been the Hussein family gardener and his topiary beasts delighted his sister Hadia (Sara Masry). She is now a ghost, too, along with her vile seducer Uday (son of Saddam and played with a darkly comic bravado by Sayyid Aki) – he’s also a ghost who carries around the severed head of his brother in a plastic bag.
Is Musa’s garden the Eden from which we’re all banished? Are we all stuck in some limbo/bardo/purgatory whether we’re living or dead? What kind of creator invents a predator and then punishes it for preying? Joseph raises unanswerable questions. By the end of the evening, there are two soldiers missing a hand and a stage full of ghosts. By some mysterious sleight of hand, though, Joseph injects comedy into this sea of bleakness and has produced a piece that is as magnificent as it is undefinable.
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo runs at the Young Vic theatre until 31st January. For more information, and for bookings, please visit www.youngvic.org.
Photos by Ellie Kurttz
