Flex time: 14 years ago I caught Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on Broadway. It was good, although I was definitely distracted by both my jet lag and the fact it starred Robin Williams. The subject matter – the Second Iraq War – was a popular one at the time, and the play perhaps just seemed like the starry culmination of a wider phenomenon.
It never made it to the UK. Or not until now. Omar Elerian’s Young Vic production is Bengal Tiger’s British debut, coming as part of a belated wave of interest in playwright Rajiv Joseph, whose King James was performed at Hampstead earlier this year and whose Archduke will form part of the Royal Court’s 2026 seventieth birthday season.
What’s most immediately striking is how weird it is. Much of it comes from the point of view of the ghost of a tiger (Kathryn Hunter), who starts the play alive but soon gets shot dead after Tom (Patrick Gibson) – astonishingly only the second stupidest of its two US soldier characters – taunts it with food, which leads to the big cat biting his hand off.
Although there is a through thread, Joseph's play is probably best viewed as a series of vignettes or playlets about the nightmare of post-Saddam Iraq, stalked by ghosts, madness and greed for the fabled hoarded wealth of the deposed dictator and his murderous sons.
It’s a portrait of a world upended, where the only person not losing their mind is Hunter’s Tiger who is – broadly speaking – entirely unfussed about having been killed. There is the vaguest suggestion of tigerishness in Hunter’s rusty coloured trench coat and its dangling belt, but there’s no naff animal acting: she strides around with the otherworldly air of an older rock star, her deadpan, seen-it-all delivery amusingly undercutting the human drama as she freely offers her often delightfully pragmatic musings – she starts the show slagging off the zoo’s lion population at length.
I think it probably helps the play to not have a tiger as famous as Williams – it’s a figure that comes and goes and is more like a chorus than a protagonist. Not that Hunter isn’t entirely magnetic: and her turn is all the more remarkable because she stepped into the role under a week before press night, replacing the ill David Threlfall until ‘further notice’. A visible autocue and an amusingly flubbed deployment of a blood bag aside, you’d never know she’d not been on this for weeks.
The wilfully meandering story follows soldiers Tom and Kev (Arinzé Kene, doing fine work in a smaller than usual role) and their encounters with the tiger and the plundered wealth of Saddam’s son Uday – a gold-plated pistol and a gold-plated toilet seat are major plot drivers. While Tom goes back to the US to ‘recover’, Kev encounters Musa (Ammar Haj Ahmad), an army translator, whose role initially seems to be ‘put-upon local exasperated by American bullshit’. But there’s more to him than meets the eye too, as we discover when he starts being hunted by another ghost: that of Uday (Sayyid Aki).
It’s a play about damaged people: there’s no real judgment here for the two young Americans – hopelessly out of their depth – who lose their minds over a toilet seat that was itself an embarrassment to the country. What Joseph makes clear is how destructive the experience is for them, both physically and psychologically. But likewise Musa: he isn’t just some random guy who was having a nice life until the Americans showed up - he worked for the horrific Uday, an experience that corroded his soul. Near the end, Musa and Tom meet a woman with leprosy - the theme of being diminished by a cruel and chaotic world is a recurrent one.
Elerian was born to direct this – the play perfectly suits his tricksterish style and capricious humour. Rajha Shakity’s flexible set is evocative, an eerie, nocturnal netherworld. There’s an Apocalypse Now-like cracked odyssey quality to the play’s depiction of a generation going mad in a chaotic, lawless conflict, but unlike the US-centricity of most of the great works about the Vietnam War, this takes a wider view of its impact on Americans, Iraqis, and even nature itself.
And I think it’s only gains from the delay in staging it over here. At this remove, it’s not only a fine drama about the hellish, morally tangled absurdity of conflict – it’s also a diagnosis of what the Second Iraq War did to a generation, that seems all the more relevant as the Tom and Kevs of this world enter US politics and inflict their trauma on the rest of us.
