Gregory Burke’s ‘Black Watch’ is set partly in the Fife pub where he interviewed a group who’d recently left the regiment, and partly in Camp Dogwood, the ‘Triangle of Death’ where they’d served in Iraq. Among the often stridently argued plays which have come out in response to the Iraq war, Burke’s all-conquering drama is remarkable for its scrupulously honest portrayal of ordinary soldiers: their voices – cunts, fucks and all – carry with unmistakeable clarity. But its extraordinary achievement is to amalgamate the military docu-drama (the hours of paranoid boredom; the piss-takes; the barely acknowledged brutality) with expressionist movement and music which enacts the feelings which the soldiers’ bare-knuckled banter leaves out.
The strength and limit of this drama is that it is, at heart, a lament for the ‘Black Watch’: bound together by gallows humour, camaraderie and the romantic ‘golden thread’ which links the contemporary recruits from Fife and Dundee with their grandfathers. In one scene, lynchpin character Cammy (the excellent Paul Rattray) runs through its 250-odd-year history while his mates costume and re-costume him in the appropriate regimentals. The end of the Black Watch as an independent regiment was announced at the same time as the play’s events. And the less parochial end of an era of warfare – aerial bombardments ‘pounding the fuck’ out of targets; soldiers fighting for the right to ‘porn and petrol’; and ‘bullyin’, not fightin’’ the new norm – is the drama’s darker thread.
As the action accelerates towards their last, ‘shittiest’ fight, the lads are all crammed on and under a pool table which represents the interior of the Warrior armed vehicle. Achingly choreographed, faultlessly executed group marching and brawl-scenes express their frustration. And Davey Anderson’s music, which takes boot-stamping classics like the regiment’s march-song ‘The Gallant Forty-Twa’ and rearranges them as haunting ballads, sung in parts by the soldiers, captures the sorrow of it all.
