Black watch: porn for the theatregoing classes

Black Watch is being performed at the Barbican Centre until 26 July and at St Ann’s Warehouse, New York, from 10 October until 30 October.

Black Watch is porn. The hit of the Edinburgh Festival in 2006, it is ostensibly an elegy for the famous Scottish regiment based on interviews following their deployment in Iraq. None the less it is pure porn. Not porn in the sexual sense, but in the military sense. Actual sexual porn festoons the men’s barracks as it does in real life. But this play is pornographic in the sense of providing risk-free enjoyment of the reality of war by proxy. And people love it: they love it so much it sold out before it opened for its London run at the Barbican Centre.

And they are right to love it. It is very good, only not in the way that it analyses an issue, but in the way that it embodies a problem. The question it keeps raising is the question the men depicted resent most persistently. When they get home, people keep asking them ‘stupid fucking questions’. ‘What was it like?’ and ‘did you kill anyone?’ Yet these are the same questions everyone in the audience secretly wants answered and which the show itself seems to promise to answer – without ever actually doing so.

So, why is it so good? In some ways it’s the language of the men recorded with forensic zeal by the playwright Gregory Burke. Think Trainspotting and roughen it up. Everyone and everything is a ‘cunt’ and the majority of modifiers are ‘wee’ and ‘fucking’. After a while the commanding officer’s standard military English seems like poetry. And yet amid the men’s gynaecological storm, there is rhythm and raw, smothered energy – as well as jokes to take the wind out of you. Sex and violence enter into a breathless soixante-neuf.

On top of this, John Tiffany’s production aspires to the status of a military tattoo in Edinburgh Castle. It also features ingenious images such as two of the men cutting their way out of the pool table in their Scottish barracks. The production is also equipped with all the latest technology – with projections of CCTV footage, football matches and porn (of course), as well as images of precision bombings in Iraq accompanied by masonry-shaking explosions. But first and foremost it is driven by impressively choreographed routines which range from barrack-room brawls to square bashing and Scottish dancing – all expressing the company’s muscular camaraderie.

As such the performance is pure sensation and herein lies its limit: it constantly promises to get beyond sensation, yet never does. It has nothing to say, least of all about the Iraqis. If the show were performed to the men who are in it, they would no doubt feel warmly endorsed and appreciated. If it were performed to their families and within their communities, it would no doubt provoke shock and discomfort – not simply because it’s a bit rude, but because the men’s bonding is an intimate secret. People like to glamorise soldiers and this certainly does that, but not in the way you expect. Not by celebrating their nobility but, paradoxically, by commemorating their lack of nobility.

At the Barbican though, the show acquires a further twist, with the men seen through the eyes of the slightly camp character researching the play. He is ridiculed as a molly-coddled ‘poof’ in contrast to these hardy, heterosexual men. And through him the play embodies another question. Why are the liberal middle-classes so fascinated by men they would normally revile as sexist, homophobic, monosyllabic bullies? Men who are very unlikely to eat five a day, so much as to smoke 40.

The answer is surely that they represent something intensely ‘real’ to the safe, sedentary neurosis of middle-class life. The extremity of their experience, of killing and being killed in Iraq. fills in the void left by a cosy life not fully lived. These men’s experience seems somehow more ‘authentic’. As such, they become vehicles for sordid fantasies of vicarious heroism which is also how they are treated in less explicit, more sanitised ways by the media. No wonder these men all seem so angry – consumers of porn they find themselves acting out the pornographic fantasies of others.

Patrick Marmion is a freelance journalist, playwright, founder of Soapbox debating forum and a part-time tutor at the University of Kent.

Black Watch is being performed at the Barbican Centre until 26 July and at St Ann’s Warehouse, New York, from 10 October until 30 October. For further details see here.

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