The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
On Thursday 11th December 2025, I went to the Young Vic with Skinners' in affiliation with the National Youth Theatre's NewViews Playwriting Competition, to see 'The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo', written by Rajiv Joseph. The play is a darkly comic and surreal play set during the Iraq War. After a tiger is killed by American soldiers, its ghost observes and interacts with both soldiers and Iraqi civilians, including a traumatised soldier and a young translator. The play explores themes of violence, mortality, guilt, faith, but predominantly, the human capacity for cruelty and compassion. Through the tiger's perspective, it examines the moral and emotional consequences of war on all who experience it. 'God', too, is a recurring motif throughout the play, and is part of a highly effective metaphor at the end of the play in the tiger's final soliloquy.
Notes and Review
I was personally taken aback in the first two scenes of the play, as I was unaware of the cast. The night we went was one of Kathryn Hunter's first performances playing the tiger. I admire and am a big fan of Hunter's work, particularly her portrayal of the witches in Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021). So I was instantly hooked. I think that helped with my enthusiasm and interest for the rest of the play. I only say this as afterwards, many of my friends and teachers seemed to dislike the play for a poor 'execution', I, however, loved it.
I loved it mainly for the form of theatre it took. Upon seeing lots of theatre recently (I am very fortunate to be able to do so), lots of it has taken the same path. At English GCSE, one learns Freytag's Pyramid, that a story must follow a problem, a climax and a resolution; the same path I have been repeatedly seeing. Joseph's play was so much more than that.
It was as if we as the audience were seeing the same story through three completely different perspectives:
- One of rationality (the translator, Musa).
- One of insanity (the soldiers and Uday Hussain, but in two different ways).
- One of existentialism (the tiger).
Maybe not even the same story, three perspectives, three stories. To some that inevitably made the play itself feel slightly disjointed, for me, it felt like an entirely new form of theatre.
I am definitely inspired by this play for aspects of my own play as I begin my first draft for the NewViews Playwriting Competition.