'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo' review — this scorched-earth portrait of war is immensely powerful

Read our review of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, now in performances at the Young Vic to 31 January 2026.

Summary

• Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo comes to London's Young Vic
• The play is set in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq
• Kathryn Hunter is riveting as a tiger navigating the horrors of war
• The cast also features Arinzé Kene as a US marine

Ghosts exist to haunt the living, who before long themselves become ghosts. That’s one way of thinking about Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer-nominated Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which has arrived at the Young Vic in a devastating slow burn of a production that will take some beating as the year’s bleakest entry. Not to mention one of its most powerful.

Rescued at the 11th hour by Kathryn Hunter stepping into the title role of the anthropomorphised tiger following the indisposition of David Threlfall, Bengal Tiger might at first seem disarmingly glib. We hear at the start the voice of George W. Bush setting the scene during the 2003 war in Iraq. What follows is a first sighting of the diminutive Hunter in mischievous form as a sweary tiger who tried vegetarianism once and didn’t like it and who (following the shift in casting) utilises the pronoun “she”.

But just when you think the character – and the play that contains her – is going to settle for sardonic flippancy throughout, Joseph ups the stakes. With a force I don’t recall from the 2011 Broadway original, which starred the late Robin Williams in fine form as the eponymous beast, Joseph brings an escalating power to his feral study of the beast within us all.

“Cruelty echoes all around me; I wonder if there’s any escape,” the tiger wonders near the end, having thought briefly that she might seek respite as a plant – an unlikely haven in a war-ravaged environment in which the gardener, Musa (the splendid Ammar Haj Ahmad, late of The Jungle at this address), is continually taken as a terrorist.

War ravages and destroys: that much we know. The brilliance of Bengal Tiger is to show the wearying, soul-sapping effect of conflict at a time just now when audiences may reasonably find themselves trying to make sense of the tidal wave of trouble spots across the globe.

The play’s deployment of the tiger has been likened to magical realism, though that suggests a whimsy miles removed from the tone that prevails here. Instead, the ever-incisive director, Omar Elerian, tightens the screws on this script’s mercilessness as he did earlier this year with the Almeida’s stunning Rhinoceros.

The tiger makes a (literal) meal of the right hand of a voluble American marine, Tom (Patrick Gibson), and pays for it with her life. That leaves Tom to obsess about the whereabouts of a gold toilet seat that once belonged to the royal palace even as the onetime Iraqi president’s son, Uday (Sayyid Aki), roams the detritus-strewn landscape perpetrating atrocities which, thank heavens, are kept offstage. (The real Uday Hussein died the year the play is set.)

Amidst such climes, what are the prospects for atonement? Not great, and Rajha Shakiry’s tiered set at one point finds the invaluable Arinzé Kene, playing a fellow marine who joins the ranks of the dead, intoning from atop the action as numerous “psycho-problems” pile up beneath his gaze. (Joseph gives ample room to the linguistically playful so as to keep the audience on side.)

An autocue suspended to one side helps Hunter along as needed, but, from my perch anyway, this protean performer already seems fully invested in another singular vision from a director with whom she worked previously on The Chairs at the Almeida in 2022. Indeed, there’s something remarkable amidst the maelstrom of machismo on view in giving the tiger over to a female performer – one wonders whether this might suggest a way forward for this play in other iterations.

And though the entire company is first-rate, Ammad provides an eviscerating evening’s emotional centre as a kind man pressed into service as a translator and, by extension, into the smouldering inferno around him. There’s “nothing left to garden,” we’re told simply but plaintively near the end in a play whose scorched-earth sensibility sends you reeling into the night.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is at the Young Vic to 31 January 2026. Book Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk.

Photo credit: Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Photos by Ellie Kurttz)