Reinventing the War Story
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After the bagpipes and the mortar shells, after the barked commands and the bleary-eyed curses, the final sounds we hear in the astonishing “Black Watch” are the heaving breaths of eight young soldiers, all of whom are in terrific physical shape. Nobody said creating extraordinary art was easy.
Their most recent exertions stem from a vigorous formation march in which the young men, members of Scotland’s storied Black Watch regiment, stride the long span of St. Ann’s Warehouse, stumbling repeatedly and pulling themselves (and, crucially, one another) upright each time. Before this, we have seen them profanely and pathetically kill time in Iraq. We have seen them sit idly with digital cameras as their American allies incinerate an area outside Fallujah for four hours, resulting in the deaths of no insurgents and two Iraqi citizens. We have seen them hide their pornography before the arrival of an embedded journalist, who invariably knows more about their fate than they themselves do.
And we have seen them — at least those who survived — back home at a pub, seething at and deflecting the naïve questions of a writer hoping to convert their experiences into a play. At least on this final score, their discomfort, and worse, is our immense gain. Gregory Burke, who compiled his riveting text from interviews with Black Watch soldiers, and director John Tiffany have created a collage as intricate and as codified as a tapestry. In terms of sheer imagination, their destabilizing and magnificent work of stagecraft, which is being presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, is unlikely to be bested by any play — perhaps by any dramatic work of any genre — about the war in Iraq.
The regiment’s mix of pride, pity, hatred, boredom, gallows wit, terror, and resignation is common to any fighting unit, but it resonates with particular force given the Black Watch’s storied 300-year history. That legacy is recounted in one of Messrs. Burke and Tiffany’s many sublime interludes, in which a soldier named Cammy (the galvanizing Paul Rattray) leads viewers through Waterloo, the Somme, Korea, and more than two dozen other battles. All the while, his fellow soldiers lift and toss him about in stylized approximations of the Highland fling, coaxing him in and out of various elaborate ceremonial outfits.
I am unaware of any war drama (at least one that didn’t lean on hallucinogens as a device, such as “Apocalypse Now”) that has resorted to surreal tableaux like this one, or like the unforgettable sequence in which the soldiers each read letters from home, let them fall to the ground, and engage in their own wordless, almost atavistic arm movements as they recreate the emotions stirred by the words from home. Blended with the foulmouthed torpor of the docudrama-style material and the anguished silences of the barroom interviews, to say nothing of the hauntingly ragged musical vignettes by Davey Anderson and Steven Hoggett (who oversaw the music and movement, respectively), these hypnotic scenes stretch and tear at what we have been conditioned to expect or even want from war stories. They jettison logic, and they make perfect sense.
The signposts of traditional war stories are still here — the scared newcomers, the hard-ass commander, the monotony interrupted with sudden carnage. And the superb 10-member cast invests these tropes with all the vigor and compassion they deserve. But by putting them in such sharp contrast with the febrile chaos of the unimaginable, Messrs. Burke and Tiffany have made these “real” scenes far more visceral. The enemy is out there somewhere, but the Black Watch — which was “amalgamated,” or incorporated into other, less renowned Scottish regiments during its two-year tour in Iraq — is as much at war with history and its own dwindling stamp on the Scottish psyche as it is with any insurgents. “What the f— have the Iraqis got to f—ing do with anything?” one soldier asks the hapless playwright. “Black Watch” brings this formless, dispiriting fight to unforgettable life.
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