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Sublime salute to squaddies at war
BLACK WATCH
Barbican Theatre
CRITICAL praise without disclaimers or caveats is so blood from a stone unusual that when it occurs it is downright creepy. It’s like the hangman saying you’ve got a pretty neck.
The eulogies for Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland’s 10-man study of the legendary Celtic regiment, have been gushing forth ever since its Edinburgh Festival premiere in 2006. By the time the play reached the Barbican last week – via New York, Sydney and New Zealand – one could have repapered the auditorium with its universally ecstatic reviews.
So much adulation is hard to swallow and, on first impressions, it seems Black Watch might have been the unfortunate victim of a media over-egging.
In a Fife pub, lead squaddie Cammy (Brian Ferguson) and his mates shoot pool and “blether pesh”, intimidating the researcher who wants to know what it was like in Iraq.
“Scottish men shouting at each other”, the words of the writer Gregory Burke, who pieced the script together from interviews with soldiers from the regiment, adequately sums up the opening scene.
Then something happens. The conversation is shattered by a burst of machine-gun fire and strobe. The pub and its denizens disappear, leaving only the pool table behind.
After a moment, a knife cuts the red baize from inside the table. A soldier emerges, and then another. Camp Dogwood, Iraq, has been born out of a pub back room; and you know you are witnessing something special.
Throughout the uninterrupted two-hour running time, Black Watch repeatedly achieves these sublime moments of theatre.
The history of the battalion becomes a seamless sartorial ballet, with Ferguson dressed and stripped like a tailor’s dummy as he recounts the ages.
Letters from home provoke a scene of mute, yearning sign language; each man rooted where he stands. By the denouement, the mere mention of military numbers is enough to break the stoniest critic’s heart.
You start to notice that everything, even in the pub scenes, is choreographed immaculately. Art and reality are acting in concert: the Jocks’ gallows humour and ripe language skilfully woven into balletic and musical flights.
The cast, down to a man, is excellent, and the production never overplays its hand (bar some slightly over-emotive score music).
The homespun songs are simple and affecting. Any hectoring message about the fatally flawed invasion of Iraq is notably absent.
Cammy’s prognosis on the siege of Fallujah is blunt: “This isnay fucking fighting. This is just plain old-fashioned bullying like.”
“Winning hearts and minds” or the “golden thread” of military lineage are bandied about as justification for their continued presence in the war, but these soldiers have no such grand delusions. They fight for each other and for their survival.
There’ll be no victory parade for the Black Watch’s efforts in Iraq, but this tribe, red hacket fixed proudly in their caps, will be saluted on the stage for years to come.
Until July 26
020 7638 8891 |
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