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Friday 5 December 2008

What about the Iraqis?

Black Watch
Barbican

Whatever Happened to Cotton Dress Girl?
New End

Divas
Apollo
 

Disney does death. That’s how Black Watch looks to me. The hit show has arrived in London with its bracing portrait of the famous Highland regiment. All its tactics and traditions are presented without criticism, including its devious recruitment policy. Get ’em young is the technique. The regiment offers teenage drifters a blend of stability, adventure and booze-soaked camaraderie, and the army becomes a surrogate family with ready-made bonds of loyalty to the past. Recruits are taught to revere the regiment’s history, ‘the golden thread’, which is exhibited here as a romanticised cartoon celebrating the footsoldier’s role in British imperialist expansion. Any independence of thought is stifled in the thuggish all-male barrack-room where the brainwashed squaddies are encouraged to chirrup the euphemism that the army’s task is merely ‘bullying’. ‘We’ll need to get f***ing used to it,’ a cadet shouts at us early on. ‘Bullying’s the f***ing job.’ The tone of aggressive, obtuse self-justification never varies.

The Black Watch were posted to central Iraq in 2004 to relieve the US Marines and we watch the tooled-up teenagers as they laze around Camp Dogwood swapping porn, engaging in cub-fights, passing time with mindless circular conversations and crowing over footage of defenceless towns being flattened by American bombs. ‘I hope there’s some left over for us,’ laughs one. They recall a British rocket test which, ha ha, vaporised a donkey and cart (and a farmer too presumably, although he doesn’t merit a mention from his killers). Their motive for fighting isn’t moral but sexual, and they look forward to a homecoming sweetened by queues of Scottish nymphomaniacs intoxicated by bloodlust.

Not till the 85th minute does anyone incur so much as a scratch in this conflict. A suicide bomber kills three soldiers and the show finally acquires a sense of moral proportion, of decency and pity, and starts to recognise the mental and physical scars that war inflicts. But what about the Iraqis? Our suffering is all — their suffering is all but absent. In the closing act an officer calls the invasion ‘the biggest Western foreign policy disaster ever’, which would be fine if he weren’t simultaneously badgering a doubtful private to sign up for another tour. This ethical contradiction goes unexamined. If you have a pacifist cell in your body, if you dislike blizzards of swearing and braggart masculinity, if you shrink from shows full of strobe lighting and nasty bangs, you should avoid this jingoistic gumboot dance and its cast of heavily armed homicidal boy-men.

As for the worldwide acclaim the show has attracted, it looks to me like a bizarre act of expiation. Black Watch has borrowed the fatalistic hypocrisies of the anti-war protestors and extended them to the army’s lower ranks. It paints the infantry in the same exonerating whitewash that the Stop The War movement used to mask its own connivance in the invasion, and it cheerfully presents all the blameworthy parties — soldiers, civilians, you, me — as virtuous innocents manipulated by omnipotent puppet-masters. Look, it says, even the killers weren’t responsible for the killing. So who was? God. Fate. Tony. Someone like that. Not us, that’s certain. A hugely comforting delusion. Blair would give this piece of quisling propaganda an approving smirk.

On a lighter note there’s a wonderful tribute to Bette Davis at the New End theatre. Paula Wilcox plays the great film noir actress with slinky aplomb. We meet her backstage as she prepares to shoot Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? alongside Joan Crawford. Caustic one-liners spill from her lips. ‘Because of germs I’m not allowed to touch the bitch except when I slap her.’ Never conventionally beautiful, Davis lacerates the type of ambitious starlet who ‘sleeps with everyone on the lot except Lassie’. Jayne Mansfield? ‘Her idea of art was how to fill a sweater.’ Recalling moments from her best-known films, Paula Wilcox turns her eyes on the audience like an imaginary camera and recreates that uneasy feline power that Davis brought to the screen. Superb stuff. This warm and spikily witty show deserves a life beyond its present run.

More divas at the Apollo where Peter Schaufuss has choreographed the back-catalogue of Piaf, Dietrich and Garland. This is a lavishly glamorous, superbly stylish and perfectly unashamed act of adoration. The presence of Dietrich comes across best. She never quite holds a note but smears it in gloops of suggestive sexiness. Some critics have taken the meat cleavers to Divas, but when I went the house was 90 per cent full. Can’t argue with that.

More articles from: Lloyd Evans | this section

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