Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo review – wild horror and sharp-toothed comedy from the Iraq war

2 days ago 5

There is an exciting wildness to the European premiere of Rajiv Joseph’s surreal black comedy about the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Firstly, an animal is played on stage, a tiger shot in a Baghdad zoo that returns from the dead to haunt the US marine who pulled the trigger. Secondly, it talks. Wisecracks, in fact, and interrogates the existence of God. A twisted version of Life of Pi? Certainly it’s less of a dream than a nightmare in which anything could happen.

The dead haunt the living … Sayyid Aki as Uday Hussein.

And things do lurch from one thing to another with illogical effect. To add to the frisson of unpredictability, Kathryn Hunter performs as the tiger after David Threlfall bowed out, until further notice, due to illness. The part was played on Broadway in 2011 by Robin Williams but Hunter brings her own comic swagger.

Director Omar Elerian has shown himself adept at handling absurdist black comedies including The Chairs (also starring Hunter) and this is an inspired match. She makes for a reluctantly rock’n’roll tiger, droll in spirit and looking like a female version of Keith Richards with bandana and electric guitar at one point.

This is primarily a play about men’s experience of war, following two marines, Kev (Arinzé Kene) and Tom (Patrick Gibson), a Dumb and Dumber double-act with sharper edges, along with their Iraqi interpreter, Musa (Ammar Haj Ahmad), who used to be a gardener to Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay. The few women here are relegated to bit parts: leper, sex worker, abused sister, all reduced to types (is this what war does?). Apart from the tiger, that is, whom Hunter emphatically calls “she”.

A wholly unconventional play in which the dead haunt the living, often comically, it seeks to do many things at once. It is theatrical but stilted, ambling in structure as characters wander from a literal landscape of urban collapse into a more symbolic realm of a burnt out Eden.

The pace is baggy and the tragedy is diffuse, its drama undercut by cerebral questioning. The production’s most enraged moments are downplayed when it could go for the jugular. But the high-wire mix of comedy, horror and intellectualism is brave, the imagination and profundity a breath of fresh air in a theatrical landscape that cleaves to easy entertainment and distraction from darkness. Joseph stares into the Nietzschean abyss, sniggering, and it sniggers back.

Rajha Shakiry’s set is a burning city that turns biblical, characters lost in the wilderness of a strange, liminal afterlife, trapped by grief or guilt, especially Musa, who feels perpetual regret for unwittingly putting his sister into the predatory hands of Uday (Sayyid Aki). The latter is his tormentor, coming back with Qusay’s (whispering!) head in a bag, and becomes a deliciously dark comic highlight.

As a play, it repeats itself and does not know how to end. But what is the ending if you are already dead and find yourself in your own repeating hell?