THEATRE NEWS

A DECADE ago, teenagers could safely go about the business of being teenagers; being a little confused, hormone-driven, striving to establish an identity and worrying about their love life and acne.

Now, thanks to the pandemic and being lied to repeatedly by politicians, hopes for the future began to crumble like a scraggy Oasis singer’s hips.

Indeed, the number one killer of men in the UK under 40 is suicide. Now that is a depressing detail. But how to transform this backdrop into a theatre play that manages to inform, entertain – and offer hope?

The answer is Perth Theatre’s I Am Tiger, ‘a heart-breaking and comic drama about loss… and keeping wild animals at home.’

Oliver Emanuel’s play draws on the problems facing young people – and aligns this with the fact that there are now more tigers kept as pets than live in the wild.

His story tells of Laura, who, after losing her big brother to suicide, is given a pet tiger by her parents. They never explain the tiger and never discuss Laura’s big brother – it’s like he didn’t exist.

“Soon things start to spiral out of control… as things tend to do with feelings of grief… and tigers...”

Artistic Director Lu Kemp says this is a story of real value. “It’s surprising to work on a play about suicide and find it optimistic. But I Am Tiger is.

“It’s about how the world can change in a moment and how we travel through darkness. This is about a young teenager finding herself again after her world is turned upside down, and she’s lost all of the markers that made her life feel knowable.

“It’s about how the ridiculous mundane world keeps going even when everything changes and how normality can be cherished.”

I Am Tiger, Perth Theatre, May 5-7.