Thoughts on Blackwatch (Acting and Blocking)

I have a confession: I actually LIKED Blackwatch after I had the pleasure of seeing it performed. In retrospect, I guess my main reason for hating it in the first place was because of the distraction of the language, thereby forcing me to not really give the play a chance from its outset. When the language no longer was an issue (Irish and Scottish brogues are no stranger to me), I was able to entertain the true meaning of the play, identify the characters more clearly, which allowed me to relate to them more than when they were a bold word at the beginning of a long line of garbled English.

The layout of the theater was also interesting, and watching the actors parade down what resembled a runway and all the space it provided was no easy task. Luckily, the direction and choreography was dead-on and each inch of the floor was skillfully utilized. The two-tiered platforms on each end of the theater further utilized space, this time vertically, and engaged the audience from what seems like every angle possible. Furthermore, the television sets, although small, related a sense of the media's affects on the War in Iraq, which was a prevalent theme throughout each of our war pieces.