'Black Watch'

After The Hurt Locker, you may feel that only film could put an audience inside the intensity, tension, and pain of a soldier's life in wartime Iraq. But two years before the release of Kathryn Bigelow's justly celebrated film, the play Black Watch proved theatre could do the same, with gut-wrenching, moving effectiveness. Created for the National Theatre of Scotland, the drama focuses on the storied Scottish regiment, shifting between a bar in Fife, where veterans talk about their tour of duty in Iraq, and Camp Dogwood, the desert base 25 miles southwest of Baghdad, where we get a grunt's-eye view of their deployment. Playwright Gregory Burke provides the authenticity, drawing his lines – blunt, unsentimental, and wildly profane – from interviews that he conducted with Black Watch soldiers who served in Iraq, and director John Tiffany stages it with inventive, riveting theatricality: A pool table in Scotland erupts into an armored vehicle on patrol in Iraq; a fatal suicide bombing plays out in agonizing slow-motion; the 300-year history of the Black Watch is narrated by one soldier as his nine mates dress and undress him in the uniforms of different eras; soldiers at mail call reveal their unspoken feelings in silent choreography; bagpipes play as they sing military ballads expressing their pride and loyalty. And the audience's connection to all of this is magnified by being seated on the stage with the action. The response has been a slew of awards and widespread critical acclaim. In his review for The Washington Post, Peter Marks wrote: "To pass up Black Watch ... is to deprive yourself of the theater's most ingenious portrait to date of the war in Iraq and of modern warfare in general." And in The New York Times, Ben Brantley called the play "one of the most richly human works of art to have emerged from this long-lived war."

Almost five years after its debut at the Edinburgh Festival, Black Watch is making its Texas premiere, and audiences will have the rare opportunity to experience the show from seating on the Bass Concert Hall stage. This is one people will be talking about for a long time.

The National Theatre of Scotland presents Black Watch Feb. 16-20, Wednesday-Saturday, 8pm; Saturday and Sunday, 2pm, at Bass Concert Hall, East 23rd & Robert Dedman Drive. For tickets or more information, call 477-6060 or visit www.texasperformingarts.org.