"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."
Rajiv Joseph based a play on a 2003 incident in Baghdad where US bombs opened part of the zoo and a Bengal tiger was left starving in its pen. A soldier attempting to feed the tiger was mauled and another soldier shot the animal dead. The play transforms the tiger into an anthropomorphic, Dantean figure that returns to question God and the meaning of existence amid war's devastation. A 10‑minute university version initially failed, but a later full-length production premiered in Los Angeles in 2009, reached Broadway starring Robin Williams, earned a Pulitzer nomination, and now opens at the Young Vic in London.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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