'Black Watch' has been described as the 'best play in this or any other universe' and has been lauded across the globe. But will it conquer Dublin audiences too?, asks Peter Crawley
GREGORY BURKE, the amiable, straight talking and reliably jocose Scottish playwright, is already hard at work on what he freely refers to as "the disappointing follow-up to Black Watch". His frequent collaborator, the Yorkshire-born director John Tiffany, has a similar self-insulating irony about the show, merely saying, "Well, I'm not directing anything ever again."
It is two years since they gave the world Black Watch, a play about the Scottish regiment's deployment to Iraq, which began as an ambitious prospectus to create "a highly physical piece of political theatre" but stumbled, somehow, into the realms of a cultural phenomenon.
Festooned with rave reviews and awards from the moment it emerged during the 2006 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and hailed even more fulsomely during a national tour of Scotland and a staggeringly successful world tour, the momentum of this spectacular play, the centrepiece of this year's Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, shows no sign of abating.
With their work heralded by the Scotsman newspaper as the third most important theatre event in Scottish history, and by the Guardian's Mark Fisher (with slightly less restraint) as "the Best Play In This Or Any Other Universe For All Time Ever", it's hard to decide whether the makers of Black Watch now resemble decorated heroes or shell-shocked survivors.
"People f*****g come out and fling themselves at your f*****g feet," Burke told me last year, with a mixture of contentment and alarm. "And they tell you things. Mums whose sons have died [in Iraq] saying, You've just told my family story. Soldiers whose stories we portray, in floods of tears, telling the actors what happened to them. It's this huge outpouring of emotion. I've been keeping away from it, because that turns a man's head, like." When the show performed in London's Barbican Theatre last July, I went in with my defences up, sceptical that any show could live up to such hype.
AMAZINGLY, IT DOES. Within minutes it disarms you with its theatrical ingenuity, arrests you with its seamless blend of earthy text and lyrical display, leaves you recoiling from unflinching truths, or thrilling to its political pulse. Before going in, I didn't know what "a highly physical piece of political theatre" could be. By the play's closing moments, I wasn't sure I could ever again settle for anything less.
Like so many masterpieces, Black Watch was a combination of inspiration and accident. In 2004, Vicky Featherstone, the artistic director of the then-nascent National Theatre of Scotland, asked Burke and Tiffany to keep an eye on the story of the soon-to-be amalgamated Black Watch, the oldest Highland regiment.
After more than 300 years of tradition, referred to as "The Golden Thread" and embodied in the distinctive red hackle perched in each soldier's Tam O'Shanter, a unique continuity existed among soldiers of the Black Watch, its core members drawn for generations from the Scottish heartland of Perthshire, Fife, Dundee and Angus.
If its absorption into the new Royal Regiment of Scotland smacked of betrayal, it was exacerbated by the war in Iraq. Sent to assist American troops in a notorious flashpoint south of Baghdad known as "the Triangle of Death", the Black Watch lost three of their soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter in an attack by a suicide car-bomber.
Under fire both at home and abroad, facing bullets and mortars in Camp Dogwood and public protest in Scotland while their regiment faced demise, the soldiers themselves seemed cut adrift, dutiful and voiceless. "War is based on glory," said Featherstone. "And there is no glory in an illegal war." Or, as one soldier in the play puts it, with flinty succinctness, "F*****g sh**e fight tay end with, though".
Determined to respect the stories of former soldiers, but keen to forge a distinctive aesthetic for the new National Theatre of Scotland, John Tiffany decided that Black Watch required an untried approach.
"I just knew that a naturalistic drama would not quite articulate the war and what the experiences of these boys had been," recalls Tiffany. Nor was verbatim drama, the voguish trend for political theatre, enough to accommodate the soldiers' story.
"They were quite willing to talk to me," Burke says of the soldiers he interviewed, "but there was this huge omission of emotion. They'd tell you all the funny bits, the hysterical bits, how bizarre war is, and how boring it is. But they won't tell you how terrifying it is. Or how emotional they get when somebody that they know dies. They became the gaps that had to be filled with Steven [Hoggett]'s choreography and John's direction."
ONE MASTERFUL EXAMPLE comes early in the play with a scene entitled Blueys. Inspired by a photograph of a soldier reading an airmail letter from home, Hoggett and the performers created a scene using movement and sign-language to provide a devastating glimpse of each man's vulnerability beneath his body armour.
"Up until then I had been really worried that we weren't going to get the audience under the skin of these boys," recalls Tiffany. "Because Greg won't put words into the mouth of soldiers, when Steven came up with that, I thought, 'That's how we're going to get inside them. That's how we're going to get to know them as human beings instead of foul-mouthed, misogynistic soldiers'."
It is a delicate and brilliantly sustained balance, where Tiffany's eye for an exquisite device and Burke's ear for the tang of truth allow the soldiers' memories of Iraq to mingle with the grubby reality of a pub in Fife. Here the hell of Basra literally pierces up through the Sunday afternoon staple of a pool table, like a nightmare that can't be suppressed.
Burke, who agrees that all his plays are about identity, is fascinated by the psychology of the army, in particular its calculated appeal to young men.
"The Black Watch is as much a working class institution as the pits," he says. "A lot of the outcry, when it was being amalgamated, and the bitterness that came out of the soldiers, owed something to having your identity taken away. What the army does is it takes these young guys who are a bit adrift and makes them proud of themselves. They swagger and wear a hat just a wee bit to the side and swing the kilt when they walk. It makes them puff their chests. And it turns them, in a weird way, into very self-reliant and decent human beings. At the same time they might go and murder some Iraqis." There is a similar process, he recognises, in marshalling young men to the cause of Jihad.
Burke accepts the criticism that the play glosses over the regiment's violent colonial past. (In 1975, for example, soldiers of the Black Watch gunned down 17-year-old Leo Norney in Belfast.) Nor does it feature any Iraqi voices, although that criticism is anticipated by the play itself.
When his alter ego in the drama, a much less tactful writer than Burke, asks if the soldiers had much contact with Iraqis, the conversation is immediately shut down. "I thought you said you were interested in us?" accuses one soldier. "I thought it was about our story?"
"I would have been mortally embarrassed trying to write an Iraqi voice," Burke admits. "I know the voices of Scottish soldiers, the mentality, I know all that. But who am I to come in and say, 'Oh, poor you. This is such a trauma we've inflicted on you. And we're going to help you by making a play about it'. No we're not. We're going to help you by getting out of the country."
That's as close as Burke comes to spelling out a political agenda, while the play valiantly avoids any easy soapbox sentiments. It's easy to say that war is bad, he agrees, but more complicated to say that war is human.
"War is something that all human societies have inflicted on one another throughout history. So what are the motivating factors behind it and what is the psychology of people who have to do it? What effect does it have on them? All these things are much more interesting than whether the war is right or wrong." Tiffany agrees. "It's just hellish when theatre folk get together and put on a play that everyone agrees with. We pulled focus to something that people rarely think about: the people who have to fight our wars. It really felt that they'd been betrayed more than anybody."
The play's politics are hardly equivocal, though. "It bleeds out through the cracks, our disgust, but certainly not in any articulated way. I don't think that it's the job of theatre to campaign. I think it's about offering people insight and understanding."
That may be key to understanding the success of Black Watch, which has become the keynote production of the National Theatre of Scotland. In telescoping a subject of local, national and global importance within its deft fusion of political content and popular entertainment, it hearkens back to the best traditions of Scottish theatre, such as the radical politics and good-night-out accessibility of John McGrath's company 7.84.
Still, such precedents are no guarantee of success, and one reason its makers seem so astonished by its enduring popularity and emotional effect is that for the longest time they thought they were staring disaster in the face.
BEFORE THE FIRST PREVIEW, Burke recalls "necking back wine and Nurofen" with Tiffany, while plotting an escape route to London "after wasting all that money on a disaster".
Tiffany's memories differ slightly, particularly on the Nurofen count ("Greg is very good at self-mythologising"), but he has admitted that he was ready to pull the show just days before opening. "You just never know what you've got until you get in front of an audience," says Burke. On that first preview, everything went perfectly for the first time.
At the end, the audience stood and cheered. From Sydney to Wellington to New York they have been cheering ever since and the Black Watch could not ask for a better elegy: a challenging and thrilling display that continues to win hearts and minds.
• Black Watch runs at the Shelbourne Hall at the RDS, Dublin from Sept 30-Oct 5 as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival