Black Watch, the hit play of last year’s festival, based on the recollections of Scottish soldiers who served in Iraq, is set to play to audiences in Los Angeles, New York, Australia, New Zealand and the Barbican in London.

Announcing the tour, Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), said that it was hoped that other UK and international dates would follow before a swansong in front of the troops who had inspired it.

A BBC film of the play and companion documentary about the impact it has had will screen in Scotland over the August Bank Holiday weekend.

“It’s really hit a moment,” Feather-stone said.

“But the way that people have responded to it has really surprised everybody.”

Black Watch, written by Gregory Burke, directed by John Tiffany and based on interviews with soldiers, follows members of the ancient regiment on its final deployment to Camp Dogwood, in southern Iraq, shortly before the Black Watch was controversially disbanded and amalgamated into the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

Far more than just an antiwar statement, it caught a national emblem in the moments before “the golden thread” linking generations of proud young men from Fife and Dundee to their ancestors in the regiment, was cut and showed how embarrassment about the war left men who had imagined they would be treated as heroes ostracised when they returned home.

One festival critic gave it six out of five stars and it won numerous theatrical awards, including the South Bank Show Award for Theatre. The Times called it a “thrilling, raw, challenging and masterful piece of work”.

Tiffany, who is currently enjoying critical acclaim with the NTS’s production of The Bacchae at the Edinburgh International Festival, added: “I hope some people in America are going to love it, but others are going to hate it because it really blames them for a lot of things.”

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