Weekend Review: “Black Watch”

The directors of The National Theatre of Scotland’s “Black Watch” ““ a play about a 300-year-old Scottish regiment stationed in Iraq ““ have seemingly decided at some point that the best way to describe a war to an audience is to give them the experience of war rather than the story of it.

Eschewing a linear plotline following a regiment through its battle experience, the National Theatre chose instead to create a multimedia assault of production techniques that transports the audience between a pub in Scotland where the survivors are interviewed and the Iraqi experiences that made them leave the army behind. And so the Freud Playhouse was transformed ““ the audience moved to the stage, surrounding the cast on both sides ““ into a pastiche of scenes from the war, from the lighting invoking the lethargic desert sun baking a stalled armored vehicle, to the faces of cast members projected onto a wall and TV screens in a parliamentary debate about the fate of the regiment, to a commander sending e-mails home to his wife against a backdrop of white noise and unnerving calm, to a barracks debate between a private and a sergeant about the propriety of being seen with pornography in an Islamic country.

And it is this immersion that makes watching “Black Watch” like experiencing a war; it is the mundane realities that make the sudden shifts to violence so powerful. The sickening, hollow thump of mortar fire closing in from the distance accompanies much of the show’s dialogue, and the jarring reports of rifle fire provide the transition between scenes at the pub and scenes in Iraq. But most immediate ““ and horrifying ““ is the sound of a suicide car bomb attack, a re-enactment of the one that killed three soldiers of the Black Watch. This is the sound of death ““ invasively loud and arresting, catapulting the audience into a trance as the dead soldiers fall to their deaths in slow motion, suspended from harnesses.

But for all the multimedia assault and immersion into the Iraq experience, the true insight of Black Watch came from its eye for the ambivalence of the soldiers and the process by which they became part of war. Maybe this was possible because of the unique perspective ““ Scottish, rather than American ““ combined with the history of the regiment. Historical loyalties, pride in one’s “mates,” dead-end jobs, and promises of glory ““ not to mention exotic “poon tang” ““ are the real forces that lure the young Scots of the Black Watch into war. And as a relatively uneducated but uncommitted group of grunts are greeted with mortars rather than regaled as heroes and sent into a deathtrap they think the Marines should handle for themselves ““ those “cowboys” ““ the theme of questioning the motives of the war becomes a prominent one.

For all “Black Watch’s” commentary on the current war ““ lines like “the greatest Western foreign policy disaster in history” should make that clear ““ the fact that Iraq is seen through the eyes of a historic regiment raises other questions about what it means to be in the army itself.

It seems unlikely that war was ever a beautiful thing, but when the play looks back to the role the Black Watch took in the first and second world wars, the confusion inherent in the Iraq mission comes to the forefront.

The soldiers don’t know who they are defending, just what they are destroying ““ and even less about what it’s supposed to mean to be a soldier.

When all the promises made to them remain unfulfilled, and the reasons behind the deaths of their friends are ambiguous at best, all war really gives the men is the chance to go home and “bore every one in the pub to death.”

““ Alex LaRue

E-mail LaRue at alarue@media.ucla.edu.

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