‘It went gangbusters’: the play about the Iraq war – told through the eyes of a starving Baghdad zoo tiger

As bombs fell on the capital, a Bengal tiger was left all alone – until a US marine shot it. Rajiv Joseph explains why he brought the beast back from the dead for his Pulitzer-nominated drama

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.