This review was commissioned for publication in Barn magazine:
The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Black Watch by playwright Gregory Burke recently came to Ebbw Vale, trailing rave reviews and breathless recommendations that it is one of the greatest shows you will ever see. It is certainly a definitive piece of theatre, despite the fact that it is now almost two years since it premiered at the Edinburgh festival.
Having already played in Scotland, Australia and New York, however, Ebbw Vale manages to get it before London and, for that, Welsh audiences have to thank a partnership between the promoters and the Welsh Assembly Government, who found the extra £40,000 required from the Deputy Minister for Regeneration’s budget.
The Arts Council of Wales has also been proactive in bringing Black Watch to Wales in anticipation of the new national theatre, hoping to set an example of the impact it can make. In that regard, judgements about the performance perhaps ought to sit alongside considerations about the level of its engagement with local people and its implications for the new national theatre.
However, on an artistic level at least, it’s hard to argue against the almost universal acclaim. Growing from Burke’s own verbatim interviews with members of The Black Watch regiment, personal and collective experience unfurls itself impressionistically from the starting point of a writer (played by Michael Nardone) conducting his research.
He does so by meeting seven soldiers in a pub, freshly returned from their tour of duty in Iraq, with the full weight of its chaos and danger bearing down upon them. It is a difficult meeting, fraught with suspicion and hostility, but not without a ribald humour. However, as the play progresses, this device begins to feel delicately intercessional, helping defuse any hint of the vicarious as it begins to uncover the personal and the real.
In Wales, it is perhaps hard for us to appreciate the emotional attachment to the military. But, for Scottish audiences, there would have been a visceral impact to the loss of a three hundred year old regiment at the same time as its soldiers, drawn mainly from dead-end working class communities in Perthshire, Fife and Angus, were dying in Iraq. Black Watch plays adroitly into this context and shows us the real human cost.
However, to talk about “the play” is only one, and, at that, perhaps the least impressive element of this performance where the physical and visual imagery provides many of the stand-out moments. Director John Tiffany and his collaborator Steven Hoggett have worked together for many years. The relationship precedes the creation of the NTS to their work at Paines Plough, the small-scale new writing company, where Vicky Featherstone was again its Artistic Director. So, in many ways, the impact of Black Watch should be seen as a culmination of their working methods, rather than setting a completely new paradigm.
For all that, there are some deeply arresting images. Memorably, we first encounter the soldiers in their desert combat fatigues, cutting their way through the red baize of a pool table from within, which only moments before had been the focus for their banter in a Glaswegian pub. The signing sequence that accompanies the soldiers’ response to receiving letters from home is heartrending. In another typically bold moment, the suicide bombing is depicted through a literal suspension of the action in time, as three dying soldiers dangle helplessly from wires.
But there is also rigorous precision in the small detail of the ensemble work when a contentious question from the writer is met with a collective setting back in the chair or a small, but simultaneous adjustment in position. Indeed, the ensemble work was of a high order throughout with the all-male cast of ten equally adept at moving from gritty naturalism to high-voltage physicality. In a bravura finale, the production draws on the spectacle and theatricality of the Edinburgh tattoo – also staged in traverse – and which is played out to the inevitably stirring accompaniment of pipes.
Simply designed by Laura Hopkins and strikingly lit by Colin Grenfell, Tiffany has marshalled an impressive production that is strongly supported by his two collaborators on music and movement, respectively, Davey Anderson and Steven Hogget. Ultimately, it is a powerful and distinctive assertion of Scottish theatre at the dawn of the twenty first century.
In truth, the Ebbw Vale Leisure Centre was not the ideal venue for this production with its unhelpful acoustics and red plastic seating. Nevertheless, the production was held to be a good match with the town’s own history of military sacrifice and continuing economic challenges.
However, questions remain about whether the local audience benefitted as much as it could have from the brief flaring of high culture within its midst. There did seem to be quite a few empty seats and I estimated that a good third of the audience were invited guests and interested members of the theatre community travelling from elsewhere.
Consequently, one has to ask, if a hugely praised, world-class piece of theatre comes to Wales and fails to reach its intended audience, what does that imply for the new national company?
As it happens, some of the board members of the new national theatre were in the audience on opening night and must have been looking on with some trepidation. Of course, by comparison with the NTS, the new national theatre will have to face a number of demanding challenges, not least the one caused by the funding disparity. But, more than anything, it will have to contend with a range of expectations caused by the erratic and inconsistent nature of theatre development in Wales.
If Black Watch was intended as some kind of challenge to Welsh theatre, then it is worth thinking about the contribution to its success by Steven Hoggett.
Steven is Artistic Director of the hugely successful Frantic Assembly, a company that was formed in Swansea in the early Nineties and left Wales after four years, because, as Steven once said to me, “it felt like we were banging our heads against a brick wall in order to get any support or funding.”
It is not that high-quality theatre of real promise and distinction cannot be created here – there is both the talent and the competency to do so. But in order to blossom, it requires nurturing. It also requires patience, clear-headedness and consistent vision – values which are often in short supply.
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