Blog 21 (Cody): Wrong Review, Black Watch

I have never been wont to allow the virtuosity and aesthetics of a well-crafted stage, well-choreographed dance moves, well-timed sound effects, good acting, bawdy jokes, and a few tear-jerking, heartbreaking scenes to absolve a play's bad or ignorant politics.  Chris Jones, however, seems far less conflicted than myself with naming Black Watch a four-star success.  Though, in a way, the play was a success insofar as it certainly drew a large audience while appealing to both conservatives and liberals: hardened conservatives got to see their "freedom ain’t free" ideology reenacted on stage while spineless liberals got to shed a few tears and feel sorry for someone.  And most importantly, the play was a spectacle.  Jones writes that Black Watch "is a genuine [?] spectacle that revels in its own theatricality and comes replete with music, marching, explosive effects and its own piper."  Do we see a problem with this reveling-in-one's-own-theatricality relative to the complex, controversial politics at play within the (major) gaps of Black Watch’s plot?  Yes, the sound effects were cool, the pornography on the TV screens hilarious, the sign-language-interpretive-dancing mesmerizing, but all the latter (for me, at least) had one primary effect: to hide the fact that these soldiers probably killed, collectively, hundreds of Iraqi civilians, demolished houses and towns, and destroyed families all because their jingoistic, male blood lead them to battle for the greater (Western) good.  Instead, the audience was meant to feel unequivocal sympathy for these white, male soldiers’ castrated warfare-hard-ons without qualifying these feelings with any geopolitical context.  As Jones writes, the play was a celebration of the “grunts on the ground” of the white, male aggressor, of this regiment’s chivalric history, which made the play “very exciting to watch.”  Yes, exciting to watch indeed, so long as you’re a white, middle-class Westerner in Chicago or Edinburgh.  Like an uncritical audience member of this play's targeted audience, Jones provides no substantive analysis of Black Watch's themes and politics, leading the reader to believe that a bricolage of theatricality, a few startling and impressive sound effects, and a war story make for a four-star performance.