Youth Theatre News

Baghdad Zoo

Baghdad Zoo is a play written by Kevin Dyer for The Playhouse Festival (2009), a National Festival that focuses on new writing for Year 5 and Year 6 pupils to perform, run each year by Polka Theatre, York Theatre Royal, Dundee Rep and Theatre Royal Plymouth.

The play is based on the true story of what happened when the American and British Invasion force entered Iraq and Baghdad Zoo, the biggest zoo in the Middle East was abandoned and looted and the animals left to die. The play follows seven children who too are abandoned in war torn Iraq and struggling to understand what has happened to their everyday lives and focuses on the hope that the group encounter when stumbling across the abandoned zoo. The play bravely challenges its audience as well as its young cast to grapple with the hard hitting reality of war and the effects it has on everyone involved and asks provocative questions about truth, hope, friendship, survival and fear.

Young cast members who performed the play at the festival had the opportunity to immerse themselves in the characters and to empathise with children their own age who have to confront war and conflict on a daily basis. The experience deepened their understanding of the world that they live in, its harsh, raw realities as well as the overwhelming power of hope and love. The piece also provided them with the potential and scope to experiment with inventive theatre making. As the play weaves together choral, ensemble and character work, as well as physical theatre, the cast had fun exploring and developing innovative ways of realising the great theatrical moments the play presented them with.

The play proves that young people want to be challenged, informed and actively engaged in situations and current events that surround them and Baghdad Zoo provided them with an ideal platform in which to do just this, in a fun, creative way.

Janna Feldman, Head of Education, Polka Theatre.