Theater Of War.(Black Watch)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Iraq's front lines come to life in an exhilarating new production. Adam Green reviews.

The stage director John Tiffany grew up in Yorkshire, England, performing in local productions of Oliver! and West Side Story, but when he saw his first Shakespeare play at thirteen, he didn't understand a word of it--an experience that made him feel "very thick" and shaped his approach to his craft. "I'm more closely allied with the popular musical theater of my childhood than with the poncey exclusivity of badly done regional Shakespeare," says Tiffany, who also lists Peter Brook, the Wooster Group, and Robert Lepage among his influences. "If you can connect music and movement with more complex intellectual and political ideas, you can make them accessible to a much wider audience."

Lately, under the auspices of the National Theatre of Scotland, Tiffany has been doing just that, and in the process creating theater that fuses all the elements of the art to deliver a jolt of urgency exclusive to the stage, most recently his irreverent, gospel--meets--glam rock take on The Bacchae . Such exhilaration can be found this month in Brooklyn, at St. Ann's Warehouse, where Tiffany and the writer Gregory Burke's extraordinary Black Watch returns after a too-brief visit last fall. The show, a smash at the 2006 Edinburgh festival, is based on interviews with Scottish soldiers who served in Iraq with the storied regiment of the title--but don't let that scare you away. This is no mere docudrama or smug evening of, as Tiffany puts it, "slightly woolly, liberal pieties." Filled with song, dance, stage effects, and video--not to mention savage humor, electric ensemble acting, and language that would make David Mamet's teeth curl-- Black Watch is some kind of masterpiece.

Burke, who took the testimony that gives the play its spine, is the ideal writer to tell the story of a group of disaffected young soldiers from Fife--and Black Watch is, above all, their story, capturing their flaws and their heroism, and mourning their betrayal by their country. He himself grew up in Fife, an industrial area in eastern Scotland; his first play, the viciously funny Gagarin Way, is set in a factory there, and he knows the tight-knit ways of its menfolk. "It's a tribal thing, isn't it?" Burke says. "There's a sense that if we stick together, we can't be beaten--and it's a very powerful force. These boys aren't fighting for Britain or Scotland. They're fighting for their regiment; they're fighting for their mates."

As he wrote Black Watch, Burke discovered, he says, that "the army is just another workplace," and his dialogue captures the profane poetry of men in forced proximity. It also captures their inability, or refusal, to articulate emotions, which gives the proceedings an admirable lack of easy sentiment but also made the director's job more difficult. "These boys don't talk about feelings and vulnerability and fear," Tiffany says. "So how do you tell their story in a way that lets the audience in?"

With the help of the wonderful choreographer Steven Hoggett and composer Davey Anderson, Tiffany builds on the inherent theatricality of the military to give Black Watch a stage vocabulary of its own. From its opening bagpipe-and-drum tattoo to its final parade, in ...