Black Watch

Performances of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch were presented as part of the Rapoport Center’s 7th Annual Conference “Aftershocks: Legacies of Conflict.” The award-winning play, written by Scottish playwright Gregory Burke, is based on actual interviews with Scottish soldiers from the Black Watch regiment who were deployed to fight in Iraq in 2003. The Black Watch is one of the oldest regiments in British history, participating for nearly three hundred years in the British imperial project. For centuries, its members have been recruited from the heart of the Scottish working class in Perthshire, Fife, and Angus. The play invites audiences to analyze the complex realities of conflict and its aftermath on all sides, imperial/colonial violence, and the contradictory and complicated ways that colonial histories are reconfigured and reproduced in the 21st century.