‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’ The tiger replies
Daniel Nelson
You have to admire US playwright Rajiv Joseph’s ambition in taking on war and God as his main themes in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. And the title shows he has originality, too.
The tiger shares the opening scenes with two US soldiers in the attack on Iraq that led to the execution of Saddam Hussein. Like most of the characters in this epic play at the Young Vic they are doomed to die but not to leave the stage.
Ghosts inhabit the heads of the living characters, and the parallel dialogues show that the past lives on in the present, which is why greed (for a looted golden gun and toilet seat) and heart-crushing cruelty (personified by Saddam’s sadistic son, Uday) are also part of human existence.
Like Uday, tigers also sometimes tear innocent children apart, because that’s what tigers do.
Which leads to the question of what sort of God makes or allows such behaviour to exist. Tigers chase and kill. So do humans. Even Musa, Uday’s artistic topiarist, who tries to resist being like the greedy, cruel man who has raped and murdered his young sister, is drawn into the quicksand of killing and power.
As you can already tell from this brief summary, there’s a lot going on here, leavened by dollops of gallows humour to make it more palatable.
But when all the shouting and confrontations and dark laughs and intense drama are put aside, I have a feeling the show’s Big Questions may not be as big and challenging as perhaps the author hoped. British theatregoers probably know that war is brutal, tyrants’ sons can be incredibly sadistic, that greed is rampant and that Nature is red in tooth and claw and humans only slightly less so; but those theatregoers seem able to live mostly undramatic lives, especially in the last three-quarters of a century.
Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps Joseph is reminding us that we shouldn’t be complacent and that, since tigers are part of the world and not god-fearing, our fears of godly retribution are unfounded. And if that's the case, where does that leave us?
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, £12 - £57, Young Vic, 66 The Cut, SE1 8LZ until 31 January. Info: Young Vic