Warwick Arts Centre, 29 April 2008

Full Company in Glenrothes

ORIGINALLY a major hit in Edinburgh during 2006, the National Theatre of Scotland’s magnificent Black Watch has subsequently toured Scotland and the world on a journey that has seen critics everywhere run completely dry of superlatives.

Audiences have flocked to it in New York, Los Angeles, Australia and New Zealand. This year it’s been to Glasgow and the Black Watch stronghold of Glenrothes, and has just embarked on an English tour which will culminate in a five week run at London’s Barbican in June.

I caught up with the NTS halfway through a soldout nine-show run at the Warwick Arts Centre, confusingly located in Coventry. It’s a big arts venue and was, even more disorientatingly, covered with posters for The Emperor’s New Kilt, another NTS show.

I had orchestrated this Southern jaunt because of an insatiable curiosity to see for myself how an English audience would react to Black Watch, this seemingly most uber-Scottish of plays, with language and accents which had even challenged the audience at the Highland Football Academy in Dingwall last summer.

There were some tiny changes; the dialogue in the first scene or two was spoken more slowly and enunciated more clearly so as to introduce the audience to the particular rhythms and structures of the Fife/Angus demotic.

Kinghorn Beach was renamed St Andrews – presumably Prince William’s being an alumnus was a factor there. I noticed no other concessions and my thoroughly English companion had no difficulty in understanding any of it; but considering a good fraction of the dialogue is in Anglo-Saxon, perhaps this is not so surprising.

John Tiffany’s direction takes Greg Burke’s tautly written play, Davey Anderson’s emotive music, Steven Hoggett’s choreography of movement, and a superb cast of actors, both old stagers (there have been some cast changes since 2006 and 2007) and new recruits, and aided by his team of set, sound, lighting, video and costume designers uses alchemical skill to unite all the disparate elements into a truly magnificent ensemble piece.

You’re probably saying, “But that’s what theatre’s all about, isn’t it?” Yes, of course it is, theatre is a magnificent alchemy, but one which alas, doesn’t always work. Or it works but only in parts. The triumph of Black Watch is that it all works, every last bit of it, all the time, then and now.

Recasting has been carried out with total attention, and is in some cases an improvement. Jack Fortune is the new Officer; with a brother, father and grandfather in the Black Watch he cannot help but add more verisimilitude than his predecessor, Peter Forbes.

In a case of life imitating art, some promotion has come from within the ranks – Paul Rattray, the original Granty, is now Cammy. Michael Nardone has left both Rome and River City behind (can’t resist getting those two in the same sentence) to sign up as the Sergeant/Writer. But the cast, like a regiment, has absorbed these changes and yet retained its own unchanged character.

The first high point was, and is, the singing of ‘The Gallant Forty Twa’, a guaranteed spinetingler, followed soon after by the fashion sequence where Cammy is dressed in a chronological sequence of uniforms, to the strains of the equally spinetingling ‘Farewell to Nigg’ (Shooglenifty).

The physical theatre interludes like the “Blueys” letter-reading with sign language, the Ten Second Fights and the final climactic Parade sequence of tightly drilled marching, fighting and falling, were perfectly executed choreographically and were just as deeply, viscerally moving on a second viewing.

The singing was if anything better than before, with Emun Elliott (Fras) in particularly fine voice and evidently enjoying it, especially on ‘Twa Recruiting Sergeants’. Listening to Margaret Bennett and Martyn Bennett ‘s ‘A Thearlaich Oig’, I suffered wet collar syndrome all over again. (For those who are made of sterner stuff, this is when you do not wipe the tears away in case you disturb your neighbours. Instead you let them roll down your cheeks).

Only one change; when Fras, Kenzie and the Sergeant slowly, balletically fall to earth after the blast, here they simply collapsed, slowly and graphically. There was no aerial wire work. It was more realistic, but less of a magnificent coup de theatre.

After an intense emotional performance running nearly two hours without interval, the English audience confounded their stiff upper lip national stereotype; they stood and cheered, calling the cast back for bow after bow. The younger female audience actually screamed, as if at a rock concert. Extraordinarily, the Sassenachs gave the show a warmer reception than the Highland audience on the night I saw it last year.

A good half of the audience stayed on to listen, question – and praise – John Tiffany, the director, who had turned up for a discussion, during which he mentioned that Black Watch will be returning to New York in October and November for a six or seven week run. That is not something which happens to foreign companies very often – if at all.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us proudly wave our saltires for the National Theatre of Scotland. They do more for Scotland’s international image than any amount of tourist advertising campaigns or Tartan Weeks. We should all salute them.

© Jennie Macfie, 2008

Links

• National Theatre of Scotland