Black Watch

14/08/2026

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In the self-reflexive Black Watch, the character playing the writer writing a play about the experiences of a Scottish military unit enquires: “What was it like in Iraq?” It is a question the soldiers get asked a lot, and one of them, Stewarty, says: “Go tay fucking Baghdad if you want tay ken what it’s like.” It is a fair point, but an unfair expectation. Who could have gone to Baghdad in the mid-2000s if they weren’t part of the military or an embedded journalist, even though, as a tourist destination, its appeal is undeniable? It is, after all, the cradle of civilisation, dating back to 3300BC, a point the lads aren’t entirely ignorant of, as they must accept that the place they would have known at school in history books as Mesopotamia is where they are now expected to protect in bringing freedom and democracy. This is freedom and democracy to a nation that, over its relatively brief history as Iraq, had already been well tampered with by British and American influences. It was the British who changed its name from Mesopotamia in 1920, and insisted on creating a regime that suited their interests: “in Aug. 23, 1921, the British installed Feisal as king of Mesopotamia, changing the official name of the country at that time to Iraq, an Arabic word which…means ‘well-rooted country.” (LA Times) “An uprising in Iraq in May 1920 united Sunni and Shia briefly against the British. It was put down, but required the deployment of more than 100,000 British and Indian troops. Thousands of Arabs were killed. Hundreds of British and Indian soldiers died. The military campaign cost Britain tens of millions of pounds — money it could not afford after the Great War.” (BBC) The play’s main character, Cammy, details the history of the Black Watch, including fighting in Flanders, the Crimea and the Boer War, before adding Mesopotamia. “Where the fuck have I heard that before?” “O…Aye.” “Here we are.” “Again.”
If the play was going to be much more than a tract, it needed to offer two things: the perspective of the soldiers fighting, and the audience a sense of Iraq as an experience. Writer Gregory Burke’s play came out of directly speaking to Black Watch soldiers who fought in Iraq, and a documentary on the making and reception of the play captures well how the drama was put together, though the play itself is so self-consciously rendered that we can find an aspect of the process in the very diegesis. This isn’t quite new for Scottish theatre, and anybody who knows, for example, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil, will be aware how important it can be to work from people’s experiences to a theatrical production and, in the performance of it, make the audience aware of the history by adopting a hectoring, pushy tone detailing facts and figures. John McGrath’s play was provisionally offered to an audience of 450 people involved in various arenas of Scottish life: academics, union men, writers, community workers, ordinary citizens, all of whom were gathered together to discuss “what kind of Scotland they wanted.” After the performance, the audience, McGrath says in his introduction to the play, “…poured out advice, corrections, suggestions of great practical value, facts, figures, books, sources, and above all enthusiasm.” Proof that art can be made by committee. The final production wasn’t afraid of polemic, with categorical swipes at the landed gentry and quotes from Marx. This was agit-prop with a debt to Brecht.
Black Watch is more deliberate and focused, but an example of dialogical theatre, of theatre that those involved in production and those who experienced the events that became the subject of the play were, along with the audience watching the performance, all in it together. The Head of the National Theatre of Scotland, Vicky Featherstone, asked Burke to look into stories about the Black Watch after the regiment returned from Iraq in 2005, and Burke started to work on a fictional tale told around the reality of their experiences.
This gives the play a basic authenticity that counters some of the prejudices the troops believed were prevalent in the public’s perception, and the play itself incorporates that prejudice and its countering. “I think people’s minds are made up about you if you were in the army”, Cammy says at the beginning of the play. “They poor fucking boys. They cannay day anything else. They cannay get a job. They get exploited by the army”, he insists. “Well I want you to fucking know. I wanted to be in the army. I could have done other stuff. I’m not a fucking knuckle-dragger.”  
But it wouldn’t have been enough to convey the perspective of the troops; it also needed to offer the experience of war. Theatre will always struggle next to cinema when it comes to action, but potentially it can make up for it by a certain type of immersion. In film, the director can adopt the most elaborate of crosscutting to generate suspense, tension and fear. It can use the camera to offer high or low angles, and sound design to capture every bomb going off. Theatre, of course, has elaborate sound effects and increasingly uses screens in productions. What it has over cinema, however, is the manifest presence of everyone simultaneously: the audience and the performers in the same room. Rather than the action of war, Burke emphasises the tension of it. These may seem components of the same dimension: that tension is part of action. But the stage can subtract tension from action and, in an awareness of the difficulties conveying the latter, can emphasise the former. Neither the actor nor the audience is in Iraq on the stage, while in a film the actors might be. Sure, films like The Battle for Haditha, The Green Zone and Redacted were usually filmed outside Iraq (in Morocco and Jordan), but they all give the impression of being somewhere the audience is not.
On the stage, the actors are above all present to the audience. Vital to the theatrical contract is the immediacy of one to the other. If post-classical Hollywood cinema’s purpose is often to take us to places we cannot go, and show us things we cannot see (as it offers multiple camera angles), theatre can immerse us in the implications our presence has for the performance we are watching. We can shout at the cinema screen as much as we like, but no actor will flinch at our presence. They exist in another realm, oblivious to an empty auditorium or a full one. But the stage actor is aware of the audience as a fact, however important it may be for them to appear indifferent to its presence. “The audience responds to performers through constant cycles of fluctuation in response to their acts during live performance. It is common for actors to complain about audiences, especially those not responding in tangible ways to live performances.” (Forum Theatre) Such a response in film makes no sense, and the cinema star doesn’t have to worry about the mundane competing for their concentration. But as one modern theatre actor noted, during important and poignant moments in a show, he heard someone shouting, “Do you want tuna and mayo or cheese and ham?” (Guardian)
In Black Watch, the audience was absent in Iraq and is present in the theatre, and Burke and the actors make much of this presence/absence. The play is predicated on confronting the idea that the audience wasn’t there, but the troops were — and central to the play is using actors as representatives for those soldiers. Now, the troops and the spectator are in the same auditorium. If the audience knows nothing of what it was like in Iraq because they weren’t in the country, they will find out something of what it was like for the troops because they have allowed themselves into the theatre, with the actors as the intermediaries.
If two of the main images of the Iraq war are the tank and the desert, the play points up the claustrophobia of the former rather than the agoraphobia of the latter, the notion of confined spaces over expanded ones, as though to give the contained audience a sense of further containment. “Sixty fucking degrees in here it was….stuck forty fucking days on end. Hatches shut.” But the play also more broadly wants to evoke the militaristic, to leave the audience feeling they are in the world of the army and not in a theatre that plays up anti-war platitudes. It isn’t the distance that matters — as if wary of Kantian disinterest and Brechtian distanciation — but proposing the spectator share a claustrophobic empathy.
Thus, location matters; while the play captures the confinement, the production nevertheless needed, by theatrical standards, a very large venue. Traditional Scottish theatre stages at the Lyceum, the Traverse, the Festival Theatre etc., just weren’t big enough. “Due to the staging and size of floor space needed, conventional theatres were not an option”, director John Tiffany says, “so we started the long and arduous task of searching for possible spaces for the production.” (Guardian) This need for a certain type of location was predicated on the play replicating an important Edinburgh festival event, while also representing the reality rather than the pomp. “I knew that I wanted to perform the piece in a space”, Tiffany adds, “in which we could create our own version of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.” It worked, as they chose a drill hall in Edinburgh. “For a split-second, you think you might have wandered into the wrong place”, Lyn Gardner said, reviewing the play. “With the bagpipes blaring and search lights roving it looks as if you are about to see a smaller version of the Tattoo.” (Guardian)
But the play is no glorification of military endeavour, even if, at the same time, it wants to register the experience of troops fighting for their country. It is this ambivalence that is at the centre of the play and which allows it to balance a pro-soldier message with an anti-war sentiment. People going into the performance are unlikely to exit it believing the war in Iraq was a good idea. But they shouldn’t necessarily walk away from it thinking that being a solider isn’t a priori an honourable way to make a living, however cursed a soldier’s life. Early in the play, the lads discuss whether someone might make a film about the war. “They fucking better” Cammy says. “I didnay fucking join the army for it nay to get immortalised on the big fucking screen.” The film may come. For the moment, they will have to settle for an acclaimed piece of theatre and a TV adaptation, while the audience is left to wonder how they feel about the war in Iraq, war generally, and a soldier’s life more particularly.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Black Watch

In the self-reflexive Black Watch, the character playing the writer writing a play about the experiences of a Scottish military unit enquires: “What was it like in Iraq?” It is a question the soldiers get asked a lot, and one of them, Stewarty, says: “Go tay fucking Baghdad if you want tay ken what it’s like.” It is a fair point, but an unfair expectation. Who could have gone to Baghdad in the mid-2000s if they weren’t part of the military or an embedded journalist, even though, as a tourist destination, its appeal is undeniable? It is, after all, the cradle of civilisation, dating back to 3300BC, a point the lads aren’t entirely ignorant of, as they must accept that the place they would have known at school in history books as Mesopotamia is where they are now expected to protect in bringing freedom and democracy. This is freedom and democracy to a nation that, over its relatively brief history as Iraq, had already been well tampered with by British and American influences. It was the British who changed its name from Mesopotamia in 1920, and insisted on creating a regime that suited their interests: “in Aug. 23, 1921, the British installed Feisal as king of Mesopotamia, changing the official name of the country at that time to Iraq, an Arabic word which…means ‘well-rooted country.” (LA Times) “An uprising in Iraq in May 1920 united Sunni and Shia briefly against the British. It was put down, but required the deployment of more than 100,000 British and Indian troops. Thousands of Arabs were killed. Hundreds of British and Indian soldiers died. The military campaign cost Britain tens of millions of pounds — money it could not afford after the Great War.” (BBC) The play’s main character, Cammy, details the history of the Black Watch, including fighting in Flanders, the Crimea and the Boer War, before adding Mesopotamia. “Where the fuck have I heard that before?” “O…Aye.” “Here we are.” “Again.”
If the play was going to be much more than a tract, it needed to offer two things: the perspective of the soldiers fighting, and the audience a sense of Iraq as an experience. Writer Gregory Burke’s play came out of directly speaking to Black Watch soldiers who fought in Iraq, and a documentary on the making and reception of the play captures well how the drama was put together, though the play itself is so self-consciously rendered that we can find an aspect of the process in the very diegesis. This isn’t quite new for Scottish theatre, and anybody who knows, for example, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil, will be aware how important it can be to work from people’s experiences to a theatrical production and, in the performance of it, make the audience aware of the history by adopting a hectoring, pushy tone detailing facts and figures. John McGrath’s play was provisionally offered to an audience of 450 people involved in various arenas of Scottish life: academics, union men, writers, community workers, ordinary citizens, all of whom were gathered together to discuss “what kind of Scotland they wanted.” After the performance, the audience, McGrath says in his introduction to the play, “…poured out advice, corrections, suggestions of great practical value, facts, figures, books, sources, and above all enthusiasm.” Proof that art can be made by committee. The final production wasn’t afraid of polemic, with categorical swipes at the landed gentry and quotes from Marx. This was agit-prop with a debt to Brecht.
Black Watch is more deliberate and focused, but an example of dialogical theatre, of theatre that those involved in production and those who experienced the events that became the subject of the play were, along with the audience watching the performance, all in it together. The Head of the National Theatre of Scotland, Vicky Featherstone, asked Burke to look into stories about the Black Watch after the regiment returned from Iraq in 2005, and Burke started to work on a fictional tale told around the reality of their experiences.
This gives the play a basic authenticity that counters some of the prejudices the troops believed were prevalent in the public’s perception, and the play itself incorporates that prejudice and its countering. “I think people’s minds are made up about you if you were in the army”, Cammy says at the beginning of the play. “They poor fucking boys. They cannay day anything else. They cannay get a job. They get exploited by the army”, he insists. “Well I want you to fucking know. I wanted to be in the army. I could have done other stuff. I’m not a fucking knuckle-dragger.”  
But it wouldn’t have been enough to convey the perspective of the troops; it also needed to offer the experience of war. Theatre will always struggle next to cinema when it comes to action, but potentially it can make up for it by a certain type of immersion. In film, the director can adopt the most elaborate of crosscutting to generate suspense, tension and fear. It can use the camera to offer high or low angles, and sound design to capture every bomb going off. Theatre, of course, has elaborate sound effects and increasingly uses screens in productions. What it has over cinema, however, is the manifest presence of everyone simultaneously: the audience and the performers in the same room. Rather than the action of war, Burke emphasises the tension of it. These may seem components of the same dimension: that tension is part of action. But the stage can subtract tension from action and, in an awareness of the difficulties conveying the latter, can emphasise the former. Neither the actor nor the audience is in Iraq on the stage, while in a film the actors might be. Sure, films like The Battle for Haditha, The Green Zone and Redacted were usually filmed outside Iraq (in Morocco and Jordan), but they all give the impression of being somewhere the audience is not.
On the stage, the actors are above all present to the audience. Vital to the theatrical contract is the immediacy of one to the other. If post-classical Hollywood cinema’s purpose is often to take us to places we cannot go, and show us things we cannot see (as it offers multiple camera angles), theatre can immerse us in the implications our presence has for the performance we are watching. We can shout at the cinema screen as much as we like, but no actor will flinch at our presence. They exist in another realm, oblivious to an empty auditorium or a full one. But the stage actor is aware of the audience as a fact, however important it may be for them to appear indifferent to its presence. “The audience responds to performers through constant cycles of fluctuation in response to their acts during live performance. It is common for actors to complain about audiences, especially those not responding in tangible ways to live performances.” (Forum Theatre) Such a response in film makes no sense, and the cinema star doesn’t have to worry about the mundane competing for their concentration. But as one modern theatre actor noted, during important and poignant moments in a show, he heard someone shouting, “Do you want tuna and mayo or cheese and ham?” (Guardian)
In Black Watch, the audience was absent in Iraq and is present in the theatre, and Burke and the actors make much of this presence/absence. The play is predicated on confronting the idea that the audience wasn’t there, but the troops were — and central to the play is using actors as representatives for those soldiers. Now, the troops and the spectator are in the same auditorium. If the audience knows nothing of what it was like in Iraq because they weren’t in the country, they will find out something of what it was like for the troops because they have allowed themselves into the theatre, with the actors as the intermediaries.
If two of the main images of the Iraq war are the tank and the desert, the play points up the claustrophobia of the former rather than the agoraphobia of the latter, the notion of confined spaces over expanded ones, as though to give the contained audience a sense of further containment. “Sixty fucking degrees in here it was….stuck forty fucking days on end. Hatches shut.” But the play also more broadly wants to evoke the militaristic, to leave the audience feeling they are in the world of the army and not in a theatre that plays up anti-war platitudes. It isn’t the distance that matters — as if wary of Kantian disinterest and Brechtian distanciation — but proposing the spectator share a claustrophobic empathy.
Thus, location matters; while the play captures the confinement, the production nevertheless needed, by theatrical standards, a very large venue. Traditional Scottish theatre stages at the Lyceum, the Traverse, the Festival Theatre etc., just weren’t big enough. “Due to the staging and size of floor space needed, conventional theatres were not an option”, director John Tiffany says, “so we started the long and arduous task of searching for possible spaces for the production.” (Guardian) This need for a certain type of location was predicated on the play replicating an important Edinburgh festival event, while also representing the reality rather than the pomp. “I knew that I wanted to perform the piece in a space”, Tiffany adds, “in which we could create our own version of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.” It worked, as they chose a drill hall in Edinburgh. “For a split-second, you think you might have wandered into the wrong place”, Lyn Gardner said, reviewing the play. “With the bagpipes blaring and search lights roving it looks as if you are about to see a smaller version of the Tattoo.” (Guardian)
But the play is no glorification of military endeavour, even if, at the same time, it wants to register the experience of troops fighting for their country. It is this ambivalence that is at the centre of the play and which allows it to balance a pro-soldier message with an anti-war sentiment. People going into the performance are unlikely to exit it believing the war in Iraq was a good idea. But they shouldn’t necessarily walk away from it thinking that being a solider isn’t a priori an honourable way to make a living, however cursed a soldier’s life. Early in the play, the lads discuss whether someone might make a film about the war. “They fucking better” Cammy says. “I didnay fucking join the army for it nay to get immortalised on the big fucking screen.” The film may come. For the moment, they will have to settle for an acclaimed piece of theatre and a TV adaptation, while the audience is left to wonder how they feel about the war in Iraq, war generally, and a soldier’s life more particularly.

© Tony McKibbin