Andrew Eaton: Is Scottish theatre as bad as Fry says?

SCOTLAND has produced just two great plays in the last 500 years: Ane Satyre Of The Thrie Estaites and Black Watch – so claimed historian Michael Fry a few weeks ago.

At first I thought this was a joke about the excessive praise that has been heaped on the National Theatre of Scotland's biggest hit (which is back on Wednesday for another tour of duty at the SECC in Glasgow before moving on to Aberdeen in October). What next? News that Black Watch is to be performed on the Moon, at the personal request of God? The play is four years old, for heaven's sake. Let's get some perspective. It's too early to say how it fits into the history of anything.

Was Fry actually serious, or just being provocative? Either way, the claim is meaningless. What criteria for greatness could possibly be applied equally to a four-year-old play and a 500-year-old play, particularly when so many works of art now considered "great" were dismissed or greeted with hostility on their first showing, being too ahead of their time for audiences? (The infamous riot at the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring leaps to mind).

I have always been slightly suspicious of the fact that I have never read a bad review of Black Watch. Does a show being greeted by five star reviews across the board, and a string of awards, make it great? Or does it just make it timely? Black Watch's strength, arguably, is that it expressed, powerfully, passionately and very entertainingly, something huge numbers of people already felt – that the war in Iraq was a complete disaster for everyone involved in it, and a terrible act of betrayal by politicians. This has been said, before and since, in a string of plays (What I Heard About Iraq, Motherland, Stuff Happens etc) and films (Fahrenheit 9/11, Green Zone, Redacted and many more), just not with the same skilfully judged sense of spectacle as Black Watch.

A play about which everyone agrees though, is a play that challenges nobody and changes nothing. Even Waiting For Godot divided critics on its premiere. If you've never seen Black Watch, do. But for the sake of balance and perspective, also watch The Mark Of Cain, a powerful movie from 2007 which says things about the British military that Black Watch conspicuously avoids saying – and exposes the limits of Black Watch's scope in the process.

• This article first appeared in Scotland on Sunday, September 12, 2010