David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. "Black Watch:" Watch your back
Your Mayor last night took in a performance of “Black Watch” at UCLA Live, an imported production from the National Theatre of Scotland that offers an insider’s view of the war in Iraq that you won’t get from the TeeVee.
Despite a mere handful of lines that connect with the visceral impact of a George Foreman uppercut (as opposed to a George Foreman grill, which is searing only if you burn yourself on it), “Black Watch” is not all that political, though, inevitably, any work of art that examines war ultimately is. It’s more interested in absorbing you in the lives of its principle characters, members of Black Watch, an elite Scottish military unit (think the Green Berets, only with centuries of prestige and legend) who were on hand to watch in dismay as it was plunged into the realm of the ordinary and mundane while serving in Iraq, and the tragedy served upon their lives as a result.
Famously, “Black Watch” is based upon interviews conducted by playwright Gregory Burke with veterans of the unit cajoled into appearing, thinking they were going to chat up a fabulous babe but ended up encountering Burke himself; it took many, many rounds of Guinness to elicit their stories. This even serves as the play’s framing device, which similarly cajoles audiences into thinking they may be witnessing a character piece before the sh!t hits the fan.
Initially, their stories of tedium and feeling at remove from the war proper (an oxymoron if ever there were one) seem to mirror those of Anthony Swoffard’s “Jarhead,” about the first Gulf War, which was adapted into a film by “American Beauty” director Sam Mendes. Again, such notions are brutally disabused.
There’s actually much artful theatricality to “Black Watch.” A history of the regiment is artfully delivered on a red carpet, like a fashion-show catwalk, as the character explicating it is repeatedly lifted by other performers and dressed and re-clad in Black Watch military uniforms spanning the group’s history. Another sequence, in which the soldiers receive letters from home then mutely yet operatically respond to them via some yowling form of deaf vocabulary, is hard to fathom textually yet speaks emotional volumes sub textually.
And then, there’s the sorry story of this war. Of the myriad egregious sins of the war in Iraq, emasculating a once-proud Scottish squadron might seem to be one of its lesser transgressions. But then, there’s this one line – “It takes 300 years to build an army that's admired and respected around the world. But it only takes three years p!ssing about in the desert in the biggest Western foreign policy disaster ever to f@ck it up completely” – and everything is transformed from the personal to the universal, and vice versa.
“Black Watch” continues through Oct. 14 at the Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus. Tickets at the link above.