<b>✭✭✭✭✭
</b><b>by Gregory Burke, directed by John Tiffany
National Theatre of Scotland, Varsity Arena, Toronto
June 6-15, 2008
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</b>One of the opening productions of the 2008 Luminato festival is <i>Black Watch</i>, the highly acclaimed play from the National Theatre of Scotland that made its debut at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006 and is now in the midst of a world tour. This is not a satirical anti-war play but the story the demise of honour as seen in UK’s dealing with other countries and particularly towards its own military. The play written by Gregory Burke after interviewing Scottish soldiers who had returned from duty in Iraq is remarkably even-handed. It celebrates the 42nd Highland Regiment of Foot formed in 1739, nicknamed the “Black Watch” for its distinctive dark tartan, but also condemns its deployment in Iraq to replace US troops and its symbolic dissolution in 2006 when all Scottish regiments were amalgamated leading the Watch to feel “stabbed in the back” by the government.
The action has the simple structure of a Writer (Paul Higgins as a stand-in for Burke) sent to a pub in Fife to interview Black Watch returnees from Iraq. All he encounters is hostility except from Cammy (Paul Rattray), who helps get is comrades to loosen up and talk. Scenes in the pub alternate with depictions of what they experienced. What makes “Black Watch” so exciting is the breath-taking theatricality of director John Tiffany’s staging. The playing area is an alley between facing bleachers. Watching the play is like following a tennis match, your head constantly shifting gaze amid Colin Grenfell’s constant roving lights. This itself already instills the sense of fear the company feels in never knowing which way danger from insurgents will come. Gareth Fry’s soundscape of explosions and missiles whistling overhead is all too realistic. Some scenes are comic as when five men in their cramped pool tabled-sized armoured wagon play a game of listing the foods they want to eat when they get back home. Yet, the most devastating scenes are played wordlessly against a musical background, as when the post arrives and each young man in turn repeatedly mimes the content of his letter or the sequence when a brawl between two troops develops into a mass series of balletic man-to-man combats where the the frustration of the troops’ service turns in upon itself. Then there is the magnificent final military tattoo where the regimented symmetry of marching patterns is regularly disturbed by a soldier falling only to be replaced by another.
Those unaccustomed to heavy Scots accents will be further disturbed by the echoey acoustics of Varsity Stadium where swaths of dialogue are lost in the reverb. Nevertheless, the action is so physical, the acting from all ten actors so intense and the theatrical environment suggesting unexpected destruction at any moment so vivid, it’s impossible not to shaken by the experience.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-06-10.
Photo: Cast of <i>Black Watch</i>. ©Pavel Antonov.
<b>2008-06-10</b>
<b>Black Watch</b>