Award-winning Black Watch comes to The Lowry

May 2 2008 Flintshire Chronicle

BLACK Watch at The Lowry at Salford Quays next week is not your usual sort of play. But then, Gregory Burke is not your usual sort of writer.

Six years ago he was working in a factory and wrote a play, the first thing he had ever written. And he watched, open-mouthed, as Gagarin Way, his take on globalisation, went from Edinburgh to London’s West End and then international success.

Said Burke: “They went mental. It was unreal. Then I thought I had better learn how to be a writer.”

Sounds serious but this down-to-earth Scot isn’t. He’s as far from luvviedom as you can get and we had a lot of laughs talking of his sudden change of fortune. His dad, he jokes, can’t believe something you do at home is a proper job!

Burke went on to success at the National Theatre and two major awards. Now he gives us Black Watch, an uncompromising view of the war in Iraq through the eyes of soldiers of the legendary Scottish regiment.

The production by the National Theatre of Scotland launched with a sell-out run at the Edinburgh Festival and went on to stun audiences and knock out critics across America and Australia, gaining more awards for Burke.

Serious for once, he is gratified that something close to his heart has made it.

He said: ‘I come from Fife, where the regiment comes from, and I know these soldiers. I wrote the play for two reasons.

‘In Iraq the Black Watch were involved in the assault on Felugia. At home they were being taken into the new Royal Regiment of Scotland. There was a lot of anger about this.

“I wanted to give the soldiers a fair crack of the whip. They are men doing this horrible job, for whatever reasons. The challenge was not to patronise or sympathise. I wanted to show them as human beings, just as they are, doing what they do. They understand this war. They know they are not going to get glory.”

Burke went into pubs to talk to former soldiers of the regiment. He drank with them, listened to them, went home and wrote. Hurtling from a pool room in Fife to an armoured wagon in Iraq, he reveals, through the men on the ground, the hardship of war and the return home.

The production makes inventive use of movement, music and song, creating complex, urgent theatrical experience.

Said Burke: ”Highland music is part of the regiment and its soldiers are trained in sword dancing. I wanted that in. In rehearsal the ideas seemed weird. Then it gelled.

“The reaction was unbelievable. Audiences completely rapt, then the standing ovations. The actors were overwhelmed. Soldiers told us they couldn’t believe anyone would care enough to do this. A mother who lost her son thanked us.”

Black Watch will play in The Pie Factory, the Lowry’s new, inventive studio space in a nearby warehouse, from May 7-10. Ring 0870 787 5793 or visit www.thelowry.com