Society & Animals 21 (2013) 105-110 brill.com/soan

Review Essay

Animals in War, Animals on War: New Perspectives from a Theater of Species Rajiv Joseph, The Bengal in the Zoo. In Gruesome Playground Injuries; Ani- mals out of Paper; at the Baghdad Zoo: Three Plays.2010. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press. 362 pp.

Michael Morpurgo, War Horse. London: Egmont. 2007/1982. 176 pp.

The fall of 2011 was an interesting time in New York for someone like me, someone who specializes in both animal studies and theater. Just about everyone I knew or met asked me whether I’d seen War Horse, and whether I’d loved it as much as they did. In time I learned to couch my answer in terms that would make it less disappointing to my interlocutor by saying that, actually, the animal play that I’d been really impressed by was The Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo. This 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist by the young New York–based play- wright Rajiv Joseph reached nowhere near the huge audience numbers that the London- bred War Horse attracted (indeed, Tiger closed in July, after three months of performances; War Horse is still running to sold-out houses) nor did it garner anything like the English play’s accolades (War Horse also won the Tony award for Best New Play), but most people I talked to had at least heard of it, if only because the Broadway production starred Robin Williams in the title role. Sadly, this was one of the things wrong with this production, a casting choice (no doubt partly box-office-driven) that seriously derailed the disturbing logic of the play and under- mined the very thing that made it most interesting from an animal studies point of view: namely, its use of an animal figure to reverse expectations and challenge assumptions. These reversals and revisions came from what I consider to be the play’s genuinely original animal perspective (as written, not as staged in this production): an orientation toward animals, including human animals, that manages to escape the sentimental and anthropocentric traditions that have stunted human-animals relations for so long, and to replace them with a genuine curiosity about how the other animals experience the world that we humans are increasingly shaping and defining for them. As written and imagined, the Tiger in Joseph’s play is a surprising, searching, and healthily skeptical creature, an ideal lens through which to reevaluate the logics that transport individuals (of various species) into alien landscapes and cultures where they are doomed to be misunderstood, to suffer, to destroy, and to be destroyed. As played by Robin Williams, however, with his trademark teddy-bearish lik- ability in full force, the Tiger turned into an avuncular fount of inexplicable insights, instead of—as he is written—a being fully immersed in and expressive of what one might call “species life,” the ecological and biological dimensions of existence. The increased appearance of animals in cultural texts—plays, movies, novels—intended for adults rather than children is one of many promising signs that cultural consciousness

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15685306-12341281 106 Review Essay / Society & Animals 21 (2013) 105-110 about the importance of other species to the future prospects of ours (and about their dire plight) is on the rise. The explosion, in academia, of interest in the history, politics, ethics, and meanings of cultural animal practices (the subject, broadly speaking, of academic ani- mal studies, now enshrined in several journals, book series, and countless conferences worldwide) is matched by an equivalent expansion of the animal presence in art and popu- lar culture, and theater (though slower to take up this theme than other art forms) has joined this trend. Of course in theater, as in the other arts, this “animal uptake” varies widely in terms of its contribution to a genuine reframing of ideas, ideologies, and attitudes toward the human relationship to the other animals. War Horse and Bengal Tiger, for example, occupy virtually opposite poles of a continuum that ranges from old-fashioned sentimentality to postmodern inscrutability. This is certainly true at the level of these plays’ plots: one a classic “boy-meets-horse, loses-horse, finds-horse” tale of interspecies loyalty in the context of vast inequalities and suffering; the other a credulity-straining tale of interspe- cies misunderstanding in the context of geopolitical insanity. Yet the staging of the works— the live events they generate and the experience they offer audiences—produce types of interspecies awareness that show how complex and layered, and therefore how promising, a “theater of species” could be.

The Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo The title of Rajiv Joseph’s play captures a major theme of the contemporary global imagina- tion: namely, displacement—the dislocation of entities from their places of origin and their sources of identity. The tiger’s displacement from Bengal to Baghdad affects his identity— he jokes that he’s now “Tiger of The Tigris”—but it also renders him, like many other characters in the play, radically, permanently, transient: “When you’re this far from home,” he says, “you know you’re never getting back.” Finally, the title conveys the fact that the complex displacements that define today’s globalized world are often played out— celebrated or lamented—through the figure, and the body, of the animal. This was certainly the case with the actual animal on whom Joseph’s tiger is modeled and the true story of his death, with which the play begins: the tiger was shot and killed by American soldiers who were guarding the zoo, when he bit the hand of one of them, who was reportedly teasing him. That actual animal, and the zoo he was in, received enormous media attention in the months following the American invasion of in 2003. As Kathryn Denning (2008) shows in an article analyzing news coverage of the war, the Baghdad Zoo quickly became a favorite and complex metaphor for journalists and others, used to represent the invaded nation itself and to justify the invasion as a necessary “libera- tion.” The poor conditions at the zoo were frequently treated as metonymic of Iraq’s mar- ginalized place in the international community, as evidence of backwardness and the necessity of external intervention, as well as a locus of liberation and symbol of recovery. For example, an article in The Mirror said of the zoo animals that “unlike the people of Iraq, these prisoners of Saddam’s cruel regime are still awaiting liberation” (quoted by Denning, 2008, p. 64). The fact that the zoo was in such terrible shape largely because it had been bombed by coalition forces during the battle for Baghdad and then pillaged for food by hungry city dwellers was never mentioned, buried under expressions of concern for the animals, reports