To Tell These War Stories, Words Aren’t Enough
by Ben Brantley
Published Oct 24, 2007
“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 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.
Gregory Burke’s Black Watch Brings Iraq War to Shattering Life
by John Heilpern
Published Oct 24, 2007
Put simply, it’s essential that you see Black Watch at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse: It’s among the most compelling theater pieces you could wish to see. And weep for, in a sense. The production from Scotland’s National Theatre is a magnificent one, and its awesome reality and humaneness will overwhelm you.
Black Watch is the first docudrama about war I’ve seen that successfully turns reportage into art. The play transcends our initial fears about the story it sets out to tell about Scotland’s fabled regiment, the Black Watch, and the war in Iraq. Perhaps we might think the issues about the war are already well known, or that this will be yet another self-satisfied antiwar saga preaching to the choir like David Hare’s Stuff Happens. But that isn’t the case for a second, and politicians as such aren’t the concern of this astonishing political play.
Another singular breakthrough of Black Watch is that it’s the first theater piece about the Iraq war to tell the story from the point of view of the soldiers. It’s an almost laughably simple idea. Its gifted (and good-humored) Scots dramatist Gregory Burke is the product of a great tradition in Scotland of a theater of passionate social conscience and historic “local” community issues...
As I run out of space and superlatives, let’s just say that if there comes along another new play and production as stunningly relevant as this one, we’ll be blessed.
November 4, 2007
NPR’s All Things Considered aired a Black Watch review/commentary piece by Alisa Solomon (produced by Allison Lichter).