It’s ironic that, since the iconic Black Watch regiment was disbanded, Gregory Burke and John Tiffany’s theatrical version has toured the world, winning hearts and minds. Like the regiment, it has also provided jobs for cocky young Scotsmen: the new ensemble is funnier and more self-deprecating than the original – possible, perhaps, now the wounds of that frustrating final campaign in Iraq are less raw.
The red-hot relevance that helped ‘Black Watch’ storm the awards three years ago has faded. But it remains a landmark piece of theatre.The left-leaning British theatre world leapt on Iraq with a vengeance but Gregory Burke’s play went beyond the Nimby-ish tone of some anti-war dramas, gaining unforgettably authentic access to combat-weary soldiers through verbatim interviews, reproduced onstage. It also went beyond the dryness of docu-drama, combining two very different kinds of contemporary theatre to brilliant effect: hard-hitting political documentary, and extravagantly expressionist choreography .
Anyone who’s seen the Edinburgh Tattoo knows that military pageantry (the music, the marching, the flamboyant tartans and feathers) is the theatre of war. John Tiffany’s production developed this into a limber and powerful dramatic language for expressing pain, loss and pride through mime and music – movingly apt for soldiers whose actions speak louder than words.
Sequences like the history of the regiment told by a soldier whose pals re-dress him in its every grab from eighteenth century kilt to twenty-first-century khaki; the sudden aerial death of three ambushed men; and moving marching songs like ‘The Gallant Forty Twa’, may not strike the same chord now as they did when British boys were dying in Basra. But, post-Iraq, ‘Black Watch’ stands as the most important dramatic account of the war from the invaders’ perspective.