a_very_ex_STAB
09-25-2007, 05:41 PM
A play about Iraq introduces a shocked LA audience to British squaddies, says Robert Fox
The impact of a Scottish play, Black Watch, performed here in Los Angeles at the weekend, should give anyone now in charge of British policy on Iraq - Gordon Brown included - serious pause for thought.
The hit of last year's Edinburgh Festival, the Scottish National Theatre production is based on interviews with six members of the Black Watch traumatised by quick succession tours in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
The language is raw and the staging rough, but the ground truth of the piece is devastating. It revolves around the fact that the regiment was axed after 280 years just when it was involved in one of its trickiest operations, the deployment to Babila to back-stop the second American attack on Fallujah in late 2004.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?storyID=8803
The impact of a Scottish play, Black Watch, performed here in Los Angeles at the weekend, should give anyone now in charge of British policy on Iraq - Gordon Brown included - serious pause for thought.
The hit of last year's Edinburgh Festival, the Scottish National Theatre production is based on interviews with six members of the Black Watch traumatised by quick succession tours in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
The language is raw and the staging rough, but the ground truth of the piece is devastating. It revolves around the fact that the regiment was axed after 280 years just when it was involved in one of its trickiest operations, the deployment to Babila to back-stop the second American attack on Fallujah in late 2004.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?storyID=8803