BLACK WATCH

To Tell These War Stories, Words Aren’t Enough
By BEN BRANTLEY-New York Times
It’s not until the first body pushes itself out of the pool table, a few minutes into the show, that you begin to grasp just how thrilling — and how disturbing — “Black Watch” is going to be. Up to that point, this transfixing play from Edinburgh about a Scottish Army regiment in Iraq, which opened last night at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, has felt like a smart but orthodox docudrama, a form increasingly common in political theater.
You go in knowing, presumably, that this production from the National Theater of Scotland, written by Gregory Burke and directed by John Tiffany, is woven from interviews with soldiers who served in Iraq with the Black Watch regiment. The opening scenes more or less confirm expectations of a gallery of talking heads of brute eloquence.
A group of young men sit around in a pub, looking wary, joking rough and ragging an enemy in their midst, an interviewer asking variations on the question they are most tired of hearing: “What was it like in Iraq?” Yes, this is all according to form, a self-conscious presentation of the making of the play you are watching.
And then, without preamble, the red felt surface of the pool table tears, and a hand punches through, followed by the full body of a man in combat fatigues, who is followed by another. Abstract memories of the dead have become an undeniable physical reality. And you know that for these men, these bodies are always there, in the pub, in the pool table, in whatever place they happen to be.
“Black Watch,” which was the hit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year and runs through Nov. 11, arrives like a blazing redeemer in the grayness of the current New York theater season, a cause for hope after a surfeit of microwaved revivals and ersatz musicals.
For “Black Watch” is a necessary reminder of the transporting power that is unique to theater. Other narrative forms — fiction, memoirs, film, television — could tell the story that is told here. But none could summon and deploy the array of artistic tools that is used with such mastery and immediacy.
In portraying the tours of duty in Iraq of members of the Black Watch, an almost 300-year-old regiment with a gloriously storied past, this production dissolves traditional boundaries of time and form. It seems to exist at the same moment in intimate close-up — of the men being interviewed — and in wide-angle historical perspective, which encompasses the generations of Black Watch soldiers who have come before these.
The means through which this breadth of vision is achieved are varied and seamlessly integrated. They include images on television monitors of villages being bombed or pornography or men of state speaking pompously; naturalistic scenes of life in Iraq remembered at home in a pub and lived in the desert, in an agony of waiting; lyrical monologues of e-mail messages sent home; regimental marches that turn into dances of death; and traditional Scottish military ballads that seem to rise out of the company like a morning mist.
Much of what is portrayed here in the naturalistic scenes will be familiar to those who have read books or seen documentaries about soldiers in this war: the double-edged sensation of boredom and anxious anticipation; the watching of mass bombings from a distance as if they were a sort of theater; the dopey adolescent camaraderie and in-fighting; and the omnipresence of the embedded news media, who seem to know more about what’s happening to the soldiers than the soldiers themselves do.
The actors, to a man, invest these scenes with an of-the-moment spontaneity and also with individuality. Within minutes after the show has begun, you’re aware of each of them as a particular presence — and not according to the usual lineup of stereotypes of military dramas. And while you can trace an arc of disenchantment through the experiences of Cammy (Paul Rattray), the play’s central figure, it never seems dictated by an imposed political agenda.
I have done this production a disservice if I have made it sound like a revue of sketches and songs. Every moment in “Black Watch” seems to bleed from the previous one in an uninterrupted river of sensations. All the scenes are choreographed, though sometimes so subtly that you don’t quite realize it. In the interview sequences in the pub, for example, notice how the men stand with their pool cues or change and move their seats.
As for the full song-and-dance numbers, brilliantly devised by Steven Hoggett (movement) and Davey Anderson (music), they stirringly elicit the poetry within both a dying military tradition and the specific men we come to know here. There’s a bravura sequence in which the entire history of the Black Watch is evoked through a sustained narrative by Cammy as he is moved about and dressed like a doll in the changing uniforms of the regiment over the centuries.
The stylistic range and unerring appropriateness of the choreography throughout are astonishing, from the silent tableau in which the soldiers respond to letters from home with their own stylized sign languages to the martial ballet in which the men work off their restlessness by fighting one another. The formation marches in which soldiers fall and get up again bring to mind the danse macabre of Paul Taylor’s “Banquet of Vultures.”
But unlike Mr. Taylor’s choreography, the dances here are less a matter of an imposed thematic vision than an evocation of individual lives harnessed together. Behind the ritual of the marches and the ceremonial dances, there is always the sense of undiluted youthful rawness, of energy in search of an outlet.
In the final marching sequence, as the men moved forward and stumbled in shifting patterns, I found to my surprise that I was crying. For this was no anonymous military phalanx. It was an assembly of men who, while moving in synchronicity, were each and every one a distinctive blend of fears and ambitions and confusion.
They were every soldier; they were also irreducibly themselves. This exquisitely sustained double vision makes “Black Watch” one of the most richly human works of art to have emerged from this long-lived war.
BLACK WATCH
By Gregory Burke; directed by John Tiffany; associate director (movement), Steven Hoggett; associate director (music), Davey Anderson; sets by Laura Hopkins; sound by Gareth Fry; lighting by Colin Grenfell; costumes by Jessica Brettle; video design by Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer for Fifty Nine Productions Ltd. A National Theater of Scotland production, presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse in association with Affinity Company Theater. At St. Ann’s Warehouse, 38 Water Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn; (718) 254-8779. Through Nov. 11. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
WITH: David Colvin (Macca), Ali Craig (Stewarty), Emun Elliott (Fraz), Ryan Fletcher (Kenzie), Jack Fortune (Officer), Paul Higgins (Writer/Sergeant), Henry Pettigrew (Rossco), Nabil Stuart (Nabsy), Paul Rattray (Cammy) and Jordan Young (Granty).