What about the Iraqis?

Black Watch

Barbican


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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.