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’.
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