The warriors' tale

Published on Sunday 13 August 2006 00:42

IN THE early 1990s, Bill Bryden staged two epic plays at the Harland and Wolff engine shed in Govan, a cavernous space two-thirds the size of a football pitch. One of them, The Ship, was a tribute to the shipbuilders of the Clyde; the other one, The Big Picnic, a salute to the soldiers of the First World War.

It is these productions that John Tiffany's staging of Gregory Burke's Black Watch for the National Theatre of Scotland most strongly recalls. It is on a similar monumental scale, being performed in the hangar-like space of the Drill Hall off Forrest Road; it strikes a chord with a broad audience with its blend of comedy, pathos, politics and song; and it gives voice to working-class Scottish experience in its representation of a group of Fife soldiers of the Black Watch regiment in action in Camp Dogwood, Iraq.

But where Bryden's shows traded in cliche and succumbed to sentimentality, never fully exploiting the theatrical potential of the space, Black Watch is a glorious piece of theatre, raw, truthful, uncomfortable, political, funny, moving, graceful and dynamic.

Coincidentally, Burke uses a technique favoured by another early-'90s theatre practitioner, Jeremy Weller, whose productions would feature real-life homeless people (Glad), juvenile delinquents (Bad) and the mentally ill (Mad). Invariably, these plays would feature a naive outsider - representing the director himself - who would stumble into the world of the dispossessed and the sidelined, and act as way in for the audience and a catalyst for the dramatic action.

Likewise in Black Watch, Burke characterises himself as a nervous playwright with a habit of asking inadvertently provocative questions of the hard-drinking boys of the Black Watch regiment when they agree to talk to him in their Fife pub. Given a brilliantly hesitant portrayal by Paul Higgins, the writer is always positioned yards away from his interviewees, the physical distance between them emphasising both his status as an interloper and the soldiers' tight-knit loyalty.

Such bold use of space is typical of Tiffany's production, which sweeps from side to side of the audience as we sit in two opposing seating banks, while the gantries on either side serve as look-out posts, politicians' podiums and backdrops for dramatic combat footage. With tremendous economy of means, designer Laura Hopkins turns a pool table into a desert surface ripped open by buried soldiers. Later it turns into an armoured truck, giving a sense of the claustrophobia in the intense Iraqi heat, while always linking the soldiers back to their roots.

The levels of testosterone in the all-male company are palpable with laddish violence and sexual banter forever breaking out. But Tiffany also finds a poetry in their experience, using plaintive dance sequences by movement director Steven Hoggett to express the yearning emotion of letters from home and celebrating the majestic grace of a military drill.

Burke's superb script captures the gallows humour, the camaraderie, the machismo and the tenderness of the men. They have shared experiences they know no civilian can appreciate, and Burke shows how the process of articulating what it means to be at war, to kill, to have friends killed, to be afraid, to be exhilarated, to be angry, is hard, sometimes painful for them. He doesn't portray them as heroes but nor does he characterise them as ignorant tools of the state war machine. They know what they're doing, and only when they find themselves employed in an unnecessary war do they take issue with their paymasters.

If the real-life soldiers were worried about their portrayal at the start of the process, they can only have felt honoured by this magnificent production and its superb cast led by Brian Ferguson as Cammy. If anyone wondered why we needed a National Theatre of Scotland, this is the answer.

The chilling taste of real life is everywhere on the Fringe in what feels like its most sober year for decades. The dramatic power of My Name is Rachel Corrie lies in the knowledge that the last thing actor Josephine Taylor says on stage is the last thing that Corrie, a young American peace campaigner, wrote down in her short life. Taylor, who gives a tremendous performance, leaves the stage as if unaware she is about to be ploughed down by an Israeli bulldozer as she tries to protect a Palestinian home. Two things strike you about Alan Rickman's production for the Royal Court, a dramatisation of Corrie's diaries, e-mails and letters edited by Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner. One is that the 23-year-old Corrie would surely have gone on to be an acclaimed writer, so articulate, vivid and passionate is her prose even from her earliest years. The other is that for all her go-get-'em youthful fearlessness, Corrie stands as a shining example to us all of how to engage with the world instead of passively consuming it.

Although the play's finale is heartbreaking, its message is inspirational.

With the glut of plays about war on the fringe come ever more representations of the world's only superpower. This tends to fall into two categories. There are those plays, such as Petrol Jesus Nightmare #5 at the Traverse, that consider the USA's imperialistic role, and those, such as the deliciously eccentric Particularly in the Heartland by the Team, also at the Traverse, that consider the psychology of the American people from a domestic point of view.

Although it was written 20 years ago, Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio fits into this second category, a collage of voices calling in to a radio chat show and demonstrating a mixture of prejudice, ignorance and self-absorption which, if we were to take it as a democratic sample, might explain the love-hate relationship the rest of the world has with the USA.

Stewart Lee's production is as seductively enjoyable to listen to as the real thing, sucking you in with its time-filling inanity like an episode of Big Brother. It takes time before the house lights come up and Phil Nichol, as the contrary shock jock, lambasts his audience for treating real political issues as mindless entertainment. "The only thing you believe in is me," he yells towards the end of a breathlessly impressive performance.

If you've still got a soft spot for mindless entertainment, however, then Midnight Cowboy could be for you. The latest in a line of film adaptations, after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Twelve Angry Men, it seems to serve no purpose except to remind people of a much-loved movie. If playwright Tim Fountain and director John Clancy had found some inventive theatrical equivalent to the screen version, then maybe it would have acquired a life of its own. As it is, apart from retelling a touching story, the exercise is pointless.

• Black Watch, University of Edinburgh Drill Hall, until August 27 (not tomorrow, or August 21); My Name is Rachel Corrie, Pleasance Courtyard, until August 28 (not tomorrow, or August 21); Talk Radio, UdderBELLY, until August 28 (not Tuesday); Midnight Cowboy, Assembly Rooms, until August 28 (not tomorrow)