It happens only a handful of times a decade: a stage production becomes part of the life of the country, breaks out of the theatre bubble and gets everyone talking. Jerry Springer the Opera is one example. The History Boys might qualify. And now there is Black Watch, the 2006 Iraq war show that established the National Theatre of Scotland as a force in world theatre. Since the summer of 2006 the show has toured Scotland, America - where it was dubbed the “theatrical event of the year” and the likes of Stephen Sondheim and the Coen brothers hurried to see it in New York - Australia and New Zealand, and next week it arrives in London.
Black Watch is an unlikely worldbeater. Its subject is ostensibly parochial: the amalgamation of the historic infantry regiment into a greater Royal Regiment of Scotland. That controversial move was approved in 2004 even as Black Watch soldiers were dying in the “triangle of death” in Iraq, where they were deployed to replace US troops besieging Fallujah. The story was picked up by the director of the new National Theatre of Scotland, Vicky Featherstone, who commissioned a play on the subject from the writer Gregory Burke.
Like many a Black Watch recruit, Burke is a working-class Fifer. He had enjoyed overnight success with the factory-set globalisation farce Gagarin Way in 2001. “I was the obvious person to phone,” he says. “If you want Scottish men shouting at each other, I'm your man.”
Burke was dispatched to interview squaddies about their experiences in Iraq. They were difficult to pin down, says the play's director, John Tiffany, because “there was such sensitivity around the subject”. Burke helped to defuse that. “I'd never met these people before,” he says, “but when I went into the room, one of them said to me: ‘You know my big sister Sharon'. And another one went: ‘Are you any relation to Chris Burke?', who's my cousin.”
Black Watch sought to tap into the vogue for docudrama, and to tell its story in the voices of real-life soldiers. Few writers could speak for those soldiers as intimately as Burke. “I know who they are. Everybody I grew up with is exactly like that.”
Those early interviews are dramatised in the play itself, albeit featuring a sappier version of Burke, because, he says, “we wanted a slightly more middle-class, liberal writer going in there, with an attitude towards soldiers more as they are usually portrayed in the arts”. That was the point: this production wouldn't portray soldiers according to the usual soldier stereotypes - which its main character, Cammy, satirises in its opening speech. “They poor f***ing boys. They cannae dae anything else. They cannae get a job. They get exploited by the Army. They dinnae want tae be there. Bollocks. Nobody's ever exploited me.”
Tiffany's masterstroke was to unite documentary with high theatricality. The director had two influences in mind. One was the Scots tradition of robust public-political entertainment, as in John McGrath's 7:84 company. The other was the Military Tattoo, that yearly celebration of soldiery in an arena beside Edinburgh Castle, attended by thousands but ignored by visitors to the Edinburgh International Festival below.
“The Tattoo feels so divorced from what soldiering is,” Tiffany says, “all these people there with their tartan blankets. But it's incredibly sentimental and powerful, and profoundly connected to history. My idea was to do some kind of Tattoo ourselves, but connected to the reality of these boys dying out there.”
What resulted was a production in which Burke's script shares focus with visceral choreography, video projection, music, military song. The play begins with a pool table in a Fife bar being ripped open and transformed into an armoured vehicle in Iraq. From then on, as the play flits between Fife and Iraq, the alarming images just keep on coming: soldiers twisting with homesickness as they read letters from loved ones; faltering then falling to the floor, unable to keep up with relentless marching parades; blown sky-high by suicide bombs.
Despite opening-night qualms, it took Burke just ten minutes in the theatre to sense that he had a hit on his hands. “You just realised,” he says. “You could see the audience reaction.” The actor Ali Craig has been in the cast since the beginning. The morning after that preview, he was stopped four or five times by people complimenting him on the show. “That's when I started to think,” he says, “that this wasn't the average play. This has affected people. This has touched people.”
Black Watch swept the boards at the Scottish Theatre Awards; it was chosen officially to open the Scottish Parliament; The New York Times raved about it; and Cate Blanchett wined and dined the company in Sydney. Given how many Iraq war dramas there have been, what makes this one so special?
Don't ask Burke. “It's like they say in movies: nobody knows what makes a hit,” he says. Of course, the show is entertaining: “It's got everything you'd want to see in the theatre,” Craig says. And its depiction of young men together (talking about sexual conquests in Kosovo, reading T.E. Lawrence in the desert, or teasing the squaddie who wasted a missile on a donkey and cart) has a wide application. “If you've ever seen a group of guys together having banter in the pub, that's what this show is.”
What distinguishes Black Watch is that, after five years of spin, argument and revision about Iraq, the play presents the war as experienced on the ground, through the eyes of those with no agenda but to get out alive. “The point,” Burke says, “was just to say, these are the people that are doing it, and they're part of your community.”
The show has been attacked for romanticising the Black Watch's brutal history and for failing to criticise militarism. “But what I didn't want to do,” Tiffany says, “was end up telling an audience that it had been a mistake to invade Iraq. I just thought, what's the point? Especially given that I'd met these soldiers personally, and come away believing that they'd been betrayed more than anybody.'
Burke agrees. “It's a challenge to make people feel sympathetic towards a thing they are opposed to: a mechanised killing machine. That's what the Army is. But at the same time it gives people jobs and a sense of identity.” His play invites us to see soldiery as yet another working-class industry, like shipbuilding or mining, sold down the river by the powerful. Perhaps that's why its audience has been drawn from beyond the usual arts constituency. “This is the only play I've been involved with that people who don't go to the theatre come and see,” Craig says.
Black Watch has been seen by many soldiers and their families. Earlier this year it played Glenrothes in Fife, where “the theatre manager used to be in the Black Watch,” Burke says, “as did the head of security in the shopping centre opposite, as did everybody else”. But there, as elsewhere, “we never had a soldier who said, ‘That's untrue'. Everybody who's seen it, whether they're Black Watch or American soldiers, has said: ‘That's what it's like. You've got it spot-on.'”
Black Watch is at the Barbican (020-7638 8891), from June 20 (returns only)
It was an outstanding success in Wellington, New Zealand and on their last night the cast performed a special haka for the audience. Very emotional.
Barbara, Wellington, New Zealand
The best thing I've seen ...maybe ever.
Bob, Atlanta, USA
You must see it, otherwise you are a dingleball.
Tina , Toronto, Canada