Review: Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

@ the Young Vic until January 31st 2026

Director: Omar Elerian

Writer: Rajiv Joseph

Cast: Peter Forbes (understudied by Jodie McNee), Ammar Haj Ahmad, Patrick Gibson, Arinzé Kene & Sayyid Aki

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When Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo opened on Broadway fifteen years ago, the titular tiger was played by Robin Williams. Having now seen the play, I can imagine few people more equipped than Williams, with his unique blend of surrealism, dry wit and intricately choreographed mayhem, to have taken on the role. At the performance I saw, the tiger was played by Jodie McNee, stepping in at the last minute, and having only read the play for the first time the day before, for an unwell Peter Forbes, who took over from Kathryn Hunter after she temporarily stepped in to replace David Threlfall, who had to step down from the role due to personal reasons. For a play that’s only been on for six weeks so far, that all seems fittingly chaotic.

Set during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Rajiv Joseph’s play is one about redemption. Straddling the fuzzy boundary between life and death, a boundary which becomes all but imperceptible in a warzone, it follows the spirit of the tiger, recently executed by an American soldier, stalking the streets of Baghdad, seeking God and experiencing a crisis of conscience about its behaviour while alive. On its “quest” in the spiritual realm, it haunts the soldier who shot it, who in turn is wracked with guilt about an injured friend. Meanwhile, a translator and former gardener for the Saddam Hussein regime, is traumatised by the horror inflicted on his family by the regime, wrestling with his desire for vengeance.

Elerian’s production is a punky, strange affair that well complements the inherent peculiarity of the text. It’s an unconventional piece, and one that sometimes strains to excavate the true depth of its themes, occasionally feeling the need to spell them out for an audience that might be a little confused by what’s actually happening on stage, but there’s real control to the staging and direction, which is sparser than the material might intimate. McNee’s performance as the tiger was superb, particularly given she was trying to get a grip on a character as atypical as this, and so too were (are) the performances of Ahmad and Aki as the translator and Saddam’s sinister, violent son Uday, who revels in the torment of those who are still alive.

Likewise, the play packs some real dramatic heft in the second act, as the consequences of various actions escalate and spiral out of control. The search for redemption quickly descends into an existential conflict about what it means to forgive both yourself and those who have inflicted harm upon you. Grand ideas about the existence of God, the nature of capitalism as it relates to war, and cycles of violence and trauma run through the veins of the play. Though I don’t think everything lands - there is sometimes a sense that the surrealism masks an absence of real emotional complexity, and the first act spends too long establishing a scenario that is so bonkers and bizarre that it almost doesn’t need any explanation at all - there’s no denying how ambitious and singular it is.

A solidly entertaining production of an intriguing play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is a curious little piece, and is exactly the sort of radical, unorthodox fare that the Young Vic always does well.

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Score: ⭐⭐⭐