'BLACK WATCH': SURREALITY OF WAR

By H. N. Burdett

Acclaimed authors and artists have sought to depict war in novels, photographs, movies and on canvas with varying degrees of success. Moving as much of their work is, the pen, the brush and the camera all come up short.

William Tecumseh Sherman was speaking literally when he declared, "War is Hell!" And Hell is inexplicable. The anguish, the torment, the terror, the spectrum of conflicting battlefield emotions and reactions - from raging lunacy to numbing silence, from acts of commendable courage to quivering cowardice - stir the blood and twist the mind into conjuring endless nightmares of what has been witnessed and felt but can neither be easily digested nor wholly processed, much less satisfactorily explained.

General Sherman was right. War really is Hell. And Hell is not reality but rather surreality in the extreme. Yet it remains vitally important to probe and examine armed conflicts between nations, past and present.

Only by focusing on the causes and consequences of war can there be any hope at all that humankind can rise above and beyond these vestiges of barbarism deliberate and calculated that reap the ultimate devastation: the destruction of lives, the distortions of reason among substantial numbers of the survivors - the world's most precious treasure, those who would have been entrusted with its very future - thereby enervating the here and now and robbing us all of contributions that can never be known.

Even those who have emerged from the turmoil and turbulence of combat more or less physically intact are never the same as they were before they entered the killing fields. Few survivors of warfare readily step forward and describe what they have been through, and understandably so. Words fail. Soul-searching art, even combat photography - freezing for all time searing images of the precise moment the unspeakable happened -can never begin to expose the horror of war in its naked entirety. And yet the efforts are worthwhile.

"Black Watch," the much-heralded presentation of the National Theatre of Scotland offers a powerful portrayal of the ongoing incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan based on Gregory Burke's interviews with men who served in the legendary military unit named in its title.

The result, with masterful use of sights, sounds, music and choreography, is seminal in that it begins to capture the surreal as well as the reality of humankind's ultimate savagery. Burke's play has deservedly garnered the 2009 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best foreign play; four Laurence Olivier Awards for best play (Burke), director (John Tiffany), choreography (Steven Hoggett) and sound design (Gareth Fry), among others too numerous to mention in this space.

From the opening moments of "Black Watch," the coarseness of language may be seen as cheap theatrics to shock and awe the audience into full attention. Perhaps so, but this is the language of the barracks. A play derived from the spoken words of combat soldiers would lose credibility if their words were sanitized beyond their own recognition. By exercising patience, any initial discomfort from the raw language is likely to dissipate as the action progresses. This is not to suggest that anyone in the audience, even the more hard-core cynical among us, will settle back with ease; this production was created not so much to entertain as to encourage us to think about what we have seen and heard and to draw our own conclusions.

For the most part, young men joined the Black Watch less to become a part of a Noble Cause than because they needed jobs. What they found in Iraq and Afghanistan was substantially different from the experience of most combatants throughout the long, sordid history of man's quest for his enemy's blood.

Battlefield tactics and strategies often quickly transformed into anachronisms. Even anti-guerrilla warfare training in many respects dissolved into obsolescence. Here the enemy was inspired by spiritual rather than patriotic zealotry; the difference can be enormous.

The Black Watch and all the other men and women participating in the current unmitigated travesties are facing down enemies convinced they are carrying out the will of a Higher Being who calls on them to rid the earth of the infidel, that their death in this perceived holiest of services will be rewarded with the most wondrous gifts paradise offers or mere mortals can imagine.

It is this promise that has sufficed to supply the enemy with endless recruits for suicide missions. Missions which virtually turn on its head Patton's celebrated comment that wars are not won by poor bastards willing to die for their country, but rather by forcing other poor bastards die for their country.

The remarkable 10-member, all-male cast of "Black Watch," a number of whom are still in theatre training, are young enough, energetic enough and, above all, talented enough to easily persuade the audience that it is watching not actors but the real thing, as well as the surreal thing.

(Black Watch is currently running through Sunday, Feb. 6 at Washington, DC's Sidney Harman Hall, 610 F Street, N.W.)