“It Was a Big Hit”: A Play About the Iraq War – Told Through the Eyes of a Hungry Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo | stage

A The play, which depicts the thoughts of a tiger on the bombed streets of Baghdad, seems strange. But Rajeev Joseph’s drama has its roots in a real incident that occurred during the invasion of Iraq. “I read the story detailing how part of the zoo was destroyed by American bombs. The Bengal tiger remained in its enclosure. All the zookeepers fled, so this poor tiger was sitting there starving. One of the soldiers, who tried to feed it out of pity, got his hand injured. Another soldier shot and killed him,” he says.

It was 2003. The war was ongoing and Joseph, in his late twenties, was studying in a master’s program at New York University. He took the death of the tiger as the starting point for a play with an absurd kind of magical realism. After being killed, the big cat returns as an anthropomorphic Dante figure to question the nature of God and the point of existence, all while wandering around this hell on earth.

Joseph performed a 10-minute version for the university’s drama festival. I fumbled. “No one seems to have responded to it,” he said in a video call from his home in New York. But then he shared it with another group of writers two years later. “I went down like a gangster.”

After the 2009 Los Angeles premiere of the full play, now called Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, it ran on Broadway with Robin Williams and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And now it is opening at the Young Vic in London, Directed by the talented director Omar Illyrian, it stars David Threlfall as the Panther (temporarily replaced by Katherine Hunter due to illness) and Arinze Cain as a Marine.

Does Joseph think the original negative response was partly due to timing? Much horror has been revealed in the years since he first proposed his idea, especially images of torture at Abu Ghraib by American soldiers. “Yes, maybe some time has passed and people have been thinking about it in a new way.”

Joseph’s writing was influenced by his time in the Peace Corps in Senegal. “I was very attracted to the Islamic rituals and customs of my village there,” he says. “I was raised Catholic but had a deep affection for Islam when I got out of the Peace Corps. After 9/11, when I had just moved to New York, the rampant anti-Islam sentiment was offensive to me.”

He felt unable to write about the conflict in Iraq, because he was not a soldier and had not visited Iraq. But the tiger—“the confusions of the primitive beast and how it might begin to deal with its surroundings”—provided a way in for him. Was Joseph channeling his existential horror from war? “A lot of this play is an inquiry into that, but Tiger’s voice is not my own. He belongs to a certain type of man I’ve met in my life that I’m drawn to in the sense of the gnarled, older, profane man.” [type]. I had a wonderful professor at NYU named Charlie Purpura. I didn’t realize it, but when a friend of mine saw the first reading of the play, he said, “Dude, that’s Charlie!”

The play embodies the brutal legacy of Saddam Hussein’s rule and the terror of the US invasion, but it steers clear of outright condemnation. Marines are not the devils of the piece. The play exudes empathy and insight into their bewildering worlds. “I think the US desecration of Iraq was guided by a certain policy, and that policy dictated the behavior of a lot of young people. A lot of these people became bad people by doing those things, but I think most people who serve in the military are not bad people but trying to do good. And when good people are put in bad situations, some terrible things happen.” He remembers a show organized in New Hampshire by veterans of the performing arts. “Their connection to the piece, their happiness in having it, has stayed with me.”

Desperate youth recur in Joseph’s works, from The Archduke, about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (opening at the Royal Court in London in 2026), to his award-winning play The Guards at the Taj Mahal. They appear to represent low-status masculinity in extremes and are victims of powerful patriarchal structures. “I’m drawn to the difficult place of male friendship over time.”

The Archduke began writing in 2014, the centenary of the First World War. The play now “seems even more important, especially with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump… The young people in the Archduke are [precursors] Of “incels”, the desperate search for the meaning of life before it ends.

Joseph was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, to a mother of French and German descent and a Malayali father from Kerala. “I don’t feel quite white, but I don’t feel quite Indian,” he says. “As I’ve grown up and become a writer, especially a playwright where you’re asked to take on the perspectives of different kinds of people, I think that’s been really helpful.” Today, there’s “a lot of anxiety about staying in your lane and just writing from your own point of view,” he adds. “I feel like I can at least evade that. No one knows where to put me.”