Two years after it stunned Edinburgh audiences, and with Scottish and international tours already under its belt, Gregory Burke’s electrifying dramatisation of the realities of military action at last makes its London debut. So decorated with praise and claims of epoch-defining significance is John Tiffany’s National Theatre of Scotland production that it bears an awesome burden of expectation. Yet it more than lives up to the hype.

Burke’s play draws on extensive research conducted with soldiers from Scotland’s Black Watch regiment, which was controversially merged with other sections of the Scottish armed forces just as its troops were dispatched to the US-controlled Camp Dogwood in Iraq’s “triangle of death”. Rather than political polemic, though, the work is concerned with the actual experience of fighting men: not just combat, but the boredom, the humour, the comradeship and the pride.

The action, performed in traverse, careers between a Perthshire pub and the Iraqi desert. In the former, a nervous writer – the fictionalised Burke – interviews an intimidating bunch of squaddies won over by his promise to pay for their drinks all day. As they revisit their two tours of duty we are plunged into a maelstrom of frenetic activity and deafening explosions, punctuated by periods of intense frustration when all the soldiers can do is wait, like sitting ducks, for the next mortar attack or suicide bombing.

The two settings collide with thrilling energy. Soldiers burst through the baize of the pub pool table. Steven Hoggett’s exquisite movement direction gives military routine a sinewy, almost balletic grace. A squaddie clutching his head in hands, contorted in misery, is revived by a touch on the shoulder from his sergeant that speaks worlds of comfort and empathy. And in the men’s coarse, uncompromising language is wit, wisdom and an absolute absence of apology or self-pity. The effect places beauty alongside brutality and endows the characters with an immense dignity.

And it’s that impression, above all, that lingers. The production concludes with an exhilarating military tattoo, complete with bagpipes, that turns into armed combat, soldiers marching, charging, falling – and, time and again, returning to lift one another from the ground. The ensemble playing is faultless, the fusion of text and production seamless, unsentimental and emotionally devastating.

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