"The Black Watch" - A Semi-Review in Narrative Form
by Elizabeth Johnstone
St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo is a cavernous space compared to most New York City theaters off Broadway, but on this particular Friday afternoon, it's claustrophobic with wall-to-wall people. I've been here only once before, to see an excruciating rendition of Hamlet, and I remember walking out then with a splitting headache and thinking, never again.
But once my friend and I are admitted, those memories don't really have an anchor. Bagpipe music is playing, and the set-up reminds me more of my high school football stadium than a theater. Chairs line the left and right sides of the huge room, arranged in bleacher-style stadium seating, and the actors will play out their game in the middle. Our seats are front row-center, and it feels like the sidelines. Just glancing around, my friend and I are two of the youngest people in the audience by far.
We're seeing Black Watch, a National Theater of Scotland production recently arrived from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The story revolves around the Black Watch battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland that was deployed to Iraq in 2004. The regiment has a long and prestigious history I figured, prior to the show, that I should already know, so I Googled them before I came.
As I read the program, the musical credits catch my eye.
"Hey!" I say, pointing. "The album is called the Ladies from Hell. That's their nickname."
"Yeah, because they wore black kilts," my friend says. "I think we read the same Wikipedia article."
Then, the lights dim, and the show starts - and doesn't stop for an hour and 50 minutes. I didn't know, as The New York Times review presumes, that the play was constructed from interviews with actual soldiers who served with the regiment in Iraq- but the opening scene makes it obvious. Muscular guys in Yves St. Laurent Pour Homme polos and trendy sneakers sit around in a pub, discussing sex in Scottish accents. The interviewer shows up and immediately doesn't mesh with this testosterone-filled world. Soon, he asks the central question of the play, straight out: "What was it like in Iraq?"
The good old question and answer- it's a time-honored storytelling device, used to varying degrees of success. Journalists attempt it daily. Playwrights like Gregory Burke, who wrote the Black Watch, see the dramatic possibilities. Humans do it instinctively. We want to know what we don't understand, so we ask.
A few years ago, I saw a play called In Treatment, written by Eve Ensler, which concerned a soldier recently returned from Iraq and his sessions with a psychiatrist. As a piece of theater, I thought it failed. The audience just hears the vague ravings of a disillusioned former soldier, which doesn't make for engaging, or thought-provoking theater.
Regardless of the point a play is trying to make, it should always be entertaining. And while on the surface Black Watch is just another politically-motivated play about the quagmire we've managed to drag soldiers into, it overcomes the storytelling device by adding the realistic human element I found missing in In Treatment - a genuine sense of bewilderment in the face of tragic and senseless events.
The soldiers in Black Watch who make it out of Iraq alive wrestle not only with the ghosts of their dead friends, but the shadow of their regiment's long and storied past. Fight sequences and death scenes are staged as elaborate, acrobatic ballets; history happens right in front of our eyes as the main character, Fraser (nicknamed "Fraz"), puts on and takes off the various uniforms the regiment wore over the years, all while reciting an elaborate monologue. I clutch my program, and I don't fall asleep once - a rare accomplishment and a credit to the different dramatic elements of the play that keep me scooting back in my seat to avoid getting kicked during the particularly athletic moments.
After the show, I ask my friend what he thought. Some parts were predictable, he says; you know what they're going to say before they say it. I agree. What else?
"The main character," my friend says, referring to Fraz. "He was good, but I didn't really get why him, and not any of the others."
I agree with that too. But perhaps even that was intentional. Why did some soldiers die, and not others? Why did this interviewer choose this particular group of young men to talk to? The point, I think, is that Fraser could have been anyone - just a guy who asks the hard questions that don't have any answers.
