A play that dramatises the thoughts of a tiger on the bombed-out streets of Baghdad sounds outlandish. But Rajiv Joseph’s drama is rooted in a real incident during the invasion of Iraq. “I read the story,” he says, “that detailed how US bombs had blown open part of the zoo. The Bengal tiger had remained in its pen. All the zookeepers had fled, so this poor tiger was sitting there starving. One of the soldiers, who tried to feed it out of compassion, got his hand mauled. Another soldier shot and killed it.”
It was 2003. The war was under way and Joseph, in his late 20s, was on a master’s programme at New York University. He took the tiger’s death as the starting point for a play with an absurdist kind of magical realism. After it is killed, the big cat returns as an anthropomorphic Dantean figure to interrogate the nature of God and the point of existence, all while padding around this hell on earth.
Joseph submitted a 10-minute version to the university’s drama festival. It flopped. “No one,” he says, on a video call from his home in New York, “seemed to respond to it.” But then he shared it with another group of writers a couple of years later. “It went down like gangbusters.”
After the 2009 Los Angeles premiere of the full-length play, now called Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, it was staged on Broadway with Robin Williams and nominated for a Pulitzer prize. Now it’s opening at the Young Vic in London, helmed by virtuoso director Omar Elerian, starring David Threlfall as the tiger (temporarily replaced by Kathryn Hunter due to illness) and Arinzé Kene as a marine.
Does Joseph think the original negative response was partly due to timing? So much horror was exposed in the years after his idea’s first outing, especially the images of torture at Abu Ghraib by US soldiers. “Yeah, it may have been that some time had passed and people were thinking about it in a new way.”
Joseph’s writing was influenced by a stint in the Peace Corps in Senegal. “I was very drawn to the Islamic rituals and customs in my village there,” he says. “I was raised Catholic but had a deep affection for Islam when I came out of the Peace Corps. After 9/11, when I had just moved to New York, the rampant anti-Islamic sentiments were offensive to me.”
He felt incapable of writing about the Iraq conflict, having never been a soldier or visited Iraq. But the tiger – “the confusions of a wild, primal beast and how he might start to reckon with his surroundings” – provided a way in. Was Joseph channelling his own existential horror of war? “A lot of this play is an inquiry into that, but the voice of the tiger is not my voice. It belongs to a certain type of man I’ve encountered in my life that I am attracted to in the sense of a gnarled, older, profane [type]. I had this wonderful professor at NYU named Charlie Purpura. I didn’t realise it, but when one of my friends saw a first reading of the play, they said, ‘Dude, it’s Charlie!’”
The play captures the brutal legacy of Saddam Hussein’s rule and the terror of the US invasion but pulls back from outright condemnation. The marines are not the devils of the piece; the play exudes compassion for and insight into their bewildered worlds. “I believe the US’s desecration of Iraq was guided by policy and that policy dictated the behaviour of a lot of young men. A lot of those people became bad people in doing those things, but I think most people who serve in the military are not bad people but trying to do good. When good people are put in bad situations, some terrible things happen.” He recalls a production staged in New Hampshire by Veterans in Performing Arts. “Their connection to the piece, their happiness that it existed, has stayed with me.”
Desperate young men recur in Joseph’s work, from Archduke, about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (opening at London’s Royal Court in 2026), to his award-winning play Guards at the Taj. They seem to represent low-status masculinity in a state of extremis and are casualties of powerful patriarchal structures. “I’m drawn to the difficult place of male friendship over time.”
He began writing Archduke in 2014, the centenary of the first world war. The play now “feels even more relevant, especially with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump … The young men in Archduke are [precursors] of ‘incels’, searching desperately for the meaning of life before it ends.”
Joseph was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, with a mother of French and German ancestry and a father who is Malayali, from Kerala. “I don’t quite feel white but I don’t quite feel Indian,” he says. “As I grew into a writer, and especially a playwright where you are required to take on the perspectives of different kinds of people, I think it’s been really helpful.” Today, there is an “outsized concern about staying in your lane and only writing from your own perspective,” he adds. “I feel I can at least evade that. No one knows where to place me.”
• Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is at the Young Vic, London, until 31 January
