The highly stylized docudrama Black Watch has proven itself a popular and critical hit at home and abroad for the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). The former Black Watch (Am Freiceadan Dubh) played a significant role in dozens of domestic and foreign military campaigns. Primarily comprising men from Dundee, Perthshire, Angus and Fife, the battalion began its work in the Highlands where it kept watch over clans to prevent smuggling and thieving. After 1739 the regiment bolstered military campaigns across the British Isles and farther afield. The British government deployed the men to sites as diverse as the West Indies, Crimea, India, Northern Ireland, Cyprus and the American colonies to establish and sustain the expanding reach of the British government during and following its imperial reign.Footnote 1 In 2003, Black Watch soldiers found themselves in Iraq, supporting the US-led invasion of the country.
As part of its inaugural 2006 season the NTS devised a theatre production about the history of the Black Watch and, in particular, the contemporary soldiers who filled its ranks. The play's dramaturgy stitches together conversations between playwright Gregory Burke and Black Watch soldiers returned home from war with fictionalized scenes at the regiment's Iraq base, Camp Dogwood. Its narrative weaves together early twenty-first-century foreign-policy debates concerning the disintegration of the Black Watch regiment, the soldiers’ current activities in Iraq, and historical references to the recruitment of the men and where they fought, including at battlefields in North America. This reflection on the past actions of the Black Watch and its tenuous future surrounds the play's highly theatrical portrayal of the deaths of three soldiers killed in an ambush north of Fallujah in November 2004.Footnote 2Black Watch deploys regimental history to depict and confront the complicated nexus of interpersonal, national and global relationships that undergird the military outfit's presence in Iraq. One such relationship, I argue, exists between the United States and Scotland. The play references Americans and North America several times, including a politician's querying of British military policy during an American presidential election year and a soldier's declaration of American soldiering to be ‘plain old-fashioned bullying’.Footnote 3 These allusions become especially provocative when considering the production's touring success in the US.
Arguably, Black Watch has emerged as the best-known of NTS performances because of its successful domestic and international tours.Footnote 4 Outside Scotland, the United States has hosted the highest number of Black Watch performances during four separate visits from 2007 to 2013.Footnote 5 While Black Watch has appeared on stages across the British Commonwealth and in former British colonies, its continued movement from city to city in the US commands attention. Its critical success and sold-out productions evidence its ongoing appeal to American audiences. I am intrigued by the fact that the production continues to attract American spectators given its critiques of American military acts. Moreover, since US-led combat troops officially ceased operations in Iraq in December 2011, the continued circulation of Black Watch potentially reactivates public dialogue about the ethics and costs of warfare in the Middle East.
Through its repeated stagings in the US, Black Watch introduces and disseminates what I am calling a ‘Scottish operative’. This operative materializes in relation to the historical and contemporary sociopolitical connections between these two nations, even as the larger UK government has mediated socio-economic and military policies affecting the US and Scotland.Footnote 6 My use of the term ‘operative’ harnesses three of its definitions. First, I link its adjectival meaning of exerting force or influence to its nominal denotation of an agent or private investigator. From this perspective, ‘operative’ describes how Black Watch performs as an advancing scout for the NTS, stimulating international (particularly American) interest in the artistic institution and Scottish theatre at large. This meaning also includes the ways in which Black Watch reiterates the historical legacy of Black Watch soldiers in military campaigns. Next, my deployment of Scottish operative encompasses operative's meaning of skilled labourers: technicians and artisans. In Black Watch these collective efforts construct tightly choreographed sequences within the show and the physical scaffolding that enables the production to tour. The Scottish operative at work in Black Watch, then, strategically exerts cultural influence that yields international visibility and financial benefits for the NTS. It also circulates (physically and digitally) the skilled labour practices necessitated by the material requirements of the show's design. One example of this operative unfolds via a military fashion show that occurs within the play's fragmented rendering of the state of Scottish subjecthood today.
Fashion, as both noun and verb, occupies a pivotal place in my analysis of Black Watch and its central scene, entitled ‘Fashion’.Footnote 7 As I am keen to flesh out how Black Watch comments on and produces American alliances, I briefly discuss another seemingly unrelated Scots-centric event taking place annually in the US: Dressed to Kilt. This eleven-year-old fashion show occurs in New York City, acting as the main fund-raiser for the Friends of Scotland charity (founded by Sir Sean Connery), which celebrates links between Scotland and the United States. At first glance, Dressed to Kilt and Black Watch seem to have little to do with one another. Dressed to Kilt features movie stars and professional athletes; Black Watch includes a cast of fairly unknown (especially while abroad) performers. The fashion show takes place one night a year; the Black Watch cast and crew replicate the same show night after night after night. While the fashion event appears light-hearted, the play features grief, boredom and violence. Both events, however, broadcast to American audiences a constructed Scottish identity stitched together from a collection of familiar icons. Although the contents of the events differ greatly, their audiences primarily consume a Scottish cultural product.
Markers of what I term ‘banal theatrical nationalism’ lie embedded within the Scottish product(ion) of Black Watch. Social psychologist Michael Billig coined the term ‘banal nationalism’ as he investigated the habitual practices, language and objects that constitute a mode of nationalism distinct from, and arguably more effective than, overt nationalist symbols and acts.Footnote 8 Scholars, including political sociologist Jonathan Hearn and cultural geographer Tim Edensor, have built upon Billig's theorization as they scrutinize Scottish and English institutions and popular culture.Footnote 9 Sociologist Alex Law, in turn, has made important distinctions within banal nationalism regarding ‘stateless nations’ such as Scotland. As Law suggests, ‘While the generic idea of nation remains banal enough, each national identity must be generated daily with particular, though mutable, semiotic material.’Footnote 10 Building from these scholars’ work, I contend that a banal theatrical nationalism shows itself in Black Watch and supports a Scottish operative on the move. This operative manifests most clearly through the production's US tours, coupled with the play's overt and implicit links between the US and Scotland. Black Watch simultaneously employs and queries signifiers of Scottishness (martial abilities, the spectacle of military music, iconic uniforms); the symbolic value of these deployments finds a material corollary when considering Scottish–American history and the future of Scottish cultural endeavours such as the NTS.
A Scottish operative emerges through Black Watch as, in the words of Edensor, ‘dynamic and dialogic, found in the constellations of a huge cultural matrix of images, ideas, spaces, things, discourses and practices’.Footnote 11 In the world of the theatre production, this assemblage includes the regimental uniforms on display, discussions of military lineage, the actors’ gestural repertoire, recruitment songs, and stage properties, including letters from home and a multi-purpose pool table. As the production tours, it carries with it the name or branding of the National Theatre of Scotland. This institutional identity joins the bodies of the cast and crew, the materials that encompass the stage and seating, and design technologies. In other words, a banal theatrical nationalism materializes as the quotidian aspects of soldiering and of theatre-making meet the stylized theatricality of this production. The ‘national’ label that adorns Black Watch makes its repeated performances especially apt for critical inquiry: as a Scottish operative, the production becomes the face of the NTS as the NTS acts as an international delegate for Scotland's performing arts.Footnote 12
In the first section of what follows I scrutinize Dressed to Kilt in order to highlight some of the relationships between fashion, theatricality and visibility that I see on display in Black Watch's aptly named scene ‘Fashion’.Footnote 13 Then, through close readings of the language and production elements of Black Watch, I tease out threads of Scotland–US military and sociocultural histories in order to discern a Scottish operative at work. Next, I widen my perspective by delving into the artistic evolution of the National Theatre of Scotland, prompted, in part, by the political devolution shaping the Scottish nation. Returning to Black Watch, I delineate two significant facets of banal theatrical nationalism before concluding with one more look at the relationship between clothing and culture.
Tailored uniforms and histories
Since April 2002, Dressed to Kilt has served as a platform for Scottish designers to transform an icon of Scotland – tartan – into hip, wearable art. This trendy parade has taken place during Tartan Week.Footnote 14 The show's former title alluded to a ubiquitous Scottish signifier while also indicating a desire to display one's cultural cachet. In 2012 Dressed to Kilt changed its name to From Scotland with Love.Footnote 15 This wordplay on one of Connery's James Bond films announces not only the physical distance between Scotland and Manhattan's Liberty Theater (the show's venue), but also a mutual affection held between Scotland and the US. Images of the blue-and-white saltire (St Andrew's cross) and purple thistles have adorned the runway and publicity materials alongside famous Scots, including Connery, actor Alan Cumming and comedian Billy Connolly.
While the designers benefit from the spotlight placed on their creativity, additional beneficiaries of these shows include American and Scottish organizations, such as the Wounded Warrior Project and Paralyzed Veterans of America, Cash for Children and Erskine Hospital. In 2010, Black Watch soldier Mark Connolly took part in Dressed to Kilt.Footnote 16 His involvement and the participation of other veterans in recent years has briefly exposed a complicated relationship between celebrity, military, charity and popular culture. These veterans act as surrogates for the thousands of military personnel recuperating across the US, Scotland and elsewhere. After a quick smile and pose for the cameras, however, they walk offstage.
Though this fashion show and Friends of Scotland may seem incompatible with Black Watch and the NTS, I want to suggest that both Dressed to Kilt and Black Watch are subject to a form of national branding.Footnote 17 Dressed to Kilt presents Scots (and their North American descendants) as hip and versatile, linked to celebrity star power. This force of fame carries over into the Wounded Warrior participants, who simultaneously embody fashion and war. Dressed to Kilt's evening of famous faces and bare legs replicates a commodifiable Scottish brand where signature features (Connery, thistles, kilts) obscure the varied cultural practices at work behind the scenes and across the diverse nation. The NTS-marked Black Watch strategically deploys fashion via military costuming within its broader frame of regimental history and life on and off the battlefield for contemporary soldiers. The uniforms displayed in ‘Fashion’ act within a network of theatrical and everyday symbols that comment on physical actions and consequences. Black Watch reintroduces and queries the history and value of Scottish symbols; its theatricality and continued US stagings, though, might end up obscuring its social commentary, thereby transforming Black Watch into an event akin to Dressed to Kilt.
Black Watch commences with an explicit nationalist symbol, a projected saltire that dances around the room, while loud recorded military music comprises a familiar soundscape. These inaugural features recall a military tattoo performance that unabashedly lauds military history and culture. ‘Fashion’ begins with a similar theatrical framing but its unfolding points to significant personal and national tensions through a roll call of uniforms and the storytelling of one soldier, Cammy, the audience's interlocutor:
Music. A red carpet rolls out, and as Cammy narrates the following history of the Black Watch the other soldiers manoeuvre him around the stage dressing him into and out of significant and distinct uniforms from the regiment's history. They resemble a squad assembling and disassembling a military cannon.Footnote 18
Two soldiers unfurl a carpet that demarcates a narrow staging area. The red colour of the carpet visually aligns the all-too-familiar marker of the prestige of a Hollywood film opening or fashion show (such as Dressed to Kilt) with the red hackle worn in Black Watch helmets. The carpet's linear shape and the soldier's steps back and forth across it regulate the advancing timeline of the chronicle. The display of historical and contemporary military apparel accessorizes and defines the travels of these Scottish soldier characters, and the men they represent, across the globe.
‘We started before Culloden’,Footnote 19 Cammy narrates, ‘We dinnay really ken [know] when. 1715, or maybe 1725. When Scotland was an independent nation we were fucking mercenaries tay half ay fuckin Europe. But it was 1739 when we really threw our lot in way the British.’Footnote 20 With military precision, the soldiers flip, lift, bend and suspend Cammy as they attire him in uniforms from the battalion's lifespan. The opening lines of this sequence tell an American audience a lot: Scotland was previously independent and soldiers from Scotland fought alongside their British counterparts. Cammy marks a national distinction by delineating Scots from ‘the British’. He demarcates boundaries around Scottish and British identities: borders that have persisted throughout the regiment's history as Scots considered the benefits and drawbacks of fighting on behalf of Britain's former empire, which, at its peak, stretched across six continents. As he dons smart uniforms, Cammy carefully clarifies Scotland's military past. His direct address to spectators positions him as an authority figure, an instructor to the students of history seated in the audience. The playtext and the production collaborate here to maintain focus on Cammy. Instead of having each soldier recount part of this shared history, the play forwards a single voice and an individual body attired in military dress. This concentration of attention visually moulds a sense of national belonging among the men that is ‘domesticated, localised and personalised’.Footnote 21 I might add to this list: banal.
Quickly within Cammy's speech, a refrain of betrayal sets in:
Some people thought we chose this dark tartan tay reflect our black, betraying hearts. Bollocks. Fuck all that Cullodenshite. The Highlands were fucked. Beat. And they [the British government] let us keep our weapons. Our kilts and our bagpipes. And they told us that we'd never have tay serve abroad. (Laughs.) But that's the fucking army for you.Footnote 22
Garments surface within his account: the dark tartan, the kilts. That the Black Watch soldiers were allowed to retain material fragments of their cultural identity, despite the Hanoverian government's proscription of these articles for other Scots, meant that the clothing and instruments carried with them an enduring sense of place and belonging. So this display of martial attire carries historical weight. Ironically, the presumption of betrayal in the soldiers’ dark tartan meets the reality of the British army's deceit of these recruited men who accumulated thousands of miles in campaigns from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first.
Throughout this pageant, after each section of regimental history and application of a corresponding uniform, Cammy walks on the red carpet to one side of the audience seating, poses, and smiles. A bright flash of light coincides with the sound of a flash bulb. The symbolic picture-taking, reminiscent of red-carpet events and fashion shows, momentarily freezes Cammy's sartorial display before his mates rush out with a great sense of urgency to continue the costume disassembly and reassembly. Observes Chris Starkie, one of the Black Watch actors responsible for (un)dressing Cammy, ‘It's like a ball of wool . . . it just keeps unravelling.’Footnote 23
Banal theatrical nationalism emerges here. This fashion show transforms the seemingly inconsequential daily tasks of (un)dressing into a theatricalized routine. It highlights the minutiae of attiring and disrobing by speeding up and repeating these acts. Intimate moments become a public event that requires an extremely precise contingent to facilitate them. As such, an embodied history transforms into a national narrative and circulates as part of a Scottish operative. This clothing, manufactured primarily from wool and cotton, represents this Scottish regiment's history within global acts of the British state. As material synecdoche, the pristine garments memorialize those soldiers’ bodies that sweated, bled, battled and died. Thus the banal and the theatrical coalesce to express a national character of soldiering, which folds back into the narrative. Cammy begins and concludes the parade in contemporary military fatigues, providing a visual cue to the cyclical dimension of his account.
He explains how this martial disposition travelled to various theatres of war, including sites in North America:
We're a fucking tribe ourselves. Beat. That's why we did so well when they sent us tay the Americas tay fight the Yankees and their Indian allies. They could fight in the forests and so could we. Beat. After the American War ay Independence we refused all Battle Honours for our part in it. Because it was rightly decreed that Battle Honours should not be granted for a war with our own kith and kin.Footnote 24
By ‘kith and kin’ Cammy refers to the Scots and Scottish descendants fighting on the side of the American colonies against King George III and the British (including many Scottish) soldiers. Scholar of Native American studies Colin G. Calloway maps out the complicated, often troubling, relationships between Scottish Highlanders and North American Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The impact of Highland Scots, including many Black Watch soldiers, went far beyond strengthening the British or American governments through military advances and losses. Many Scots married and/or had sexual encounters with American Indian women (some, presumably, against the woman's will), acts which resulted in hundreds of biracial children.Footnote 25 To gain compensation for their service during the earlier Seven Years War,Footnote 26 Scottish soldiers who had fought in New York petitioned the British government for land on both sides of the Hudson River. Many of these men, soldiers of varying ranks, began to farm their newly acquired properties.Footnote 27 The military operative at work here consolidated territory and forged kinship alliances; soldiers transformed land from a theatre of war to a self-sustaining home. These acts of fathering children and cultivating lands ensured enduring bonds between the US and Scotland.
Cammy's observations, while seemingly restricted to a Scottish world-view, extend to cultural life in North America. ‘We've got a lot ay links tay North America. There's a Black Watch in Canada and our Pipes and Drums played at JFK's funeral. They fucking love us over there. Cannay get enough ay the history ay. All the shite they dinnay have.’Footnote 28 The allusion to John F. Kennedy, himself a mythologized thread of American history, substantiates Cammy's claim about ‘links’ to North America. He incorporates this musical performance that marked an American president's death into his narrative of the life of the Scottish regiment. This line collaborates with another in the play that mocks an American's ancestry as ‘Scotch’ to poke fun at imagined and embodied Scots–American connections. Of course, the production's successful American tours and organizations such as Friends of Scotland bear out such associations.
Cammy's observation that North Americans do not have a history makes a noteworthy counterpoint to the self-enunciated ancient Celtic genealogy of his cohort. However, Black Watch's temporal point of origin occurred just a few decades before the American colonies began formal talks of independence. So we could interpret Cammy's critique of North American history, which we might localize through his JFK reference to mean US history, as unwittingly questioning the legitimacy of his (regiment's) past. In equating ‘history’ with ‘shite’ Cammy questions the value and purpose of history. His remark reverberates against the words of the Officer, who explains to Cammy why the Officer fights, ‘It's in the blood . . . It's part of who we are, where we come from. It's the reason you join up in the first place. The Golden Thread.’Footnote 29
The golden thread weaves Scotland and the US together while also symbolizing the genealogy between Scottish soldiers past and present. In the realm of geopolitics, the thread indicates the value of Black Watch soldiers, as military operatives, in building Britain's imperial realm. Cammy's list of campaigns and battlefields evidences the men's crisscrossing of oceans and continents: the Black Watch fortified military lines; they quelled uprisings. Their tartan weave, sans gold, eventually denoted bravery, honour and loyalty. Given Cammy's earlier observation, though, the familial bond that results from subsequent generations joining the Black Watch has become tainted with the notion of history as nonsensical shite. According to US theatre critic Jeremy McCarter, the fashion parade ‘sets him [Cammy] up, near the end, to make a mature and devastating argument for the damage this war has done to the men and women who agree to risk their lives defending us’.Footnote 30 Recognizing changes in battle strategy – the suicide bombers, the IEDs – and Scotland's shifting position in light of British and American governmental policies,Footnote 31 Cammy tells the Officer that this will be his last battle. He walks away, dismissing the biological imperative of soldiering and cutting the thread.
Cammy's storytelling suggests Scotland's complicity with violence that shored up Britain's commercial interests abroad from the eighteenth century to more recent years. With each camera's flash, Cammy silently acquiesces to the historical account of this military lineage. His smile displays a knowing Scotsman who can speak to and discredit the past. He is manhandled like a living model by his colleagues, but after the fashion show he enacts his independence by leaving the military.Footnote 32 Cammy's departure from soldiering to pursue an uncertain future gestures toward the self-conscious pioneering ethos of the NTS. Cammy makes a calculated choice about stepping onto unfamiliar terrain: life after soldiering. As a future-thinking artistic institution, the NTS identifies and promotes itself as innovative and risky in its programming and partnerships, countering established forms of national theatre companies. At arm's length from the Scottish government, the NTS circulates as a cultural operative throughout the UK and into international circuits. As the Scottish Parliament, a semi-autonomous political entity within the UK, readies itself for an upcoming referendum on independence, politicians and citizens calculate their futures (like the NTS and Cammy) by considering potential risks and rewards.
Black Watch's interface with nationalism
The NTS took shape through vigorous debates held by the performing arts and political communities over many years. One catalyst to its creation came in the form of the 1998 Scotland Act, which re-established the Scottish Parliament as part of devolution in the United Kingdom. Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) legislate on ‘devolved’ matters, including transport, agriculture, education, and tourism and economic development. ‘Reserved’ matters, deemed crucial to the functioning of the UK in its entirety, include immigration, foreign policy, defence, and trade and industry.Footnote 33 The Westminster Parliament – comprising representatives from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – legislate these affairs. Shortly after the proceedings that reopened a Scottish Parliament nearly three hundred years after the 1707 Act of Union had ended its earlier configuration, MSPs began discussions regarding the establishment of a national theatre.Footnote 34
During a Scottish Parliament committee meeting in December 1999, spokespeople for various cultural institutions discussed the merits of a national theatre. Former Lyceum Theatre Director Kenny Ireland expressed a concern shared by many practitioners: ‘I hope that we are all agreed that a new building would be a very bad idea.’Footnote 35 National-theatre advocates worried that the costs of running a large performance venue would grow exponentially and dictate the organization's programming and that it would pose a serious challenge to potential audiences living elsewhere. In September 2003 former finance minister Andy Kerr announced that Scottish Executive funds of £7.5 million would support the establishment and first two years of a National Theatre of Scotland.Footnote 36 This decision demonstrated a confidence in the performing arts to promote national interests.
The NTS creates partnerships with theatres, artists, and companies across Scotland (and increasingly abroad) in order to support the artists and practices that constitute Scotland's performing artscape. The national organization has frequently traded in extant dramatic literature for contemporary adaptations, site-specific events, or collaboratively devised and digitally disseminated work.Footnote 37 Flexibility, mobility and adaptability characterize this travelling institution. It is this kind of malleability that manifests in Black Watch and connects this artistic endeavour to the actions required by the varied military theatres in which Black Watch soldiers operated. The 1999 remit of this ‘homeless’ national organization was – and arguably still is, fourteen years on – to ‘enhance the existing infrastructure, exploit more fully the existing financial investment in Scottish theatre and provide a national and international platform for Scotland's most popular performing art form’.Footnote 38 Not wishing to appear parochial, the NTS advocates for and seeks out international artistic partnerships and performance opportunities, exporting its artistic efforts.
When Black Watch began its first of four tours to the US in 2007, it did so via Los Angeles (Freud Playhouse) and New York City (St Ann's Warehouse). While the cultural capital of these cities makes them an obvious draw to the NTS/Black Watch team, I wish to consider briefly the military and social histories embedded within some of their tour stops. While a visit to Fort Ticonderoga from New York City takes several hours by car,Footnote 39 descendants of the Scottish soldiers who cultivated land along the Hudson River beginning in the eighteenth century have likely ventured downriver, nearer to St Ann's Brooklyn location. Black Watch's 2008 Norfolk (Scope Arena) performance draws my attention because of the city's proximity to American military operations, including Naval Station Norfolk and Naval Weapons Station Yorktown. The nearby Virginia Arts Festival programmes an international tattoo like the one in Edinburgh referenced in the play's opening moments. The NTS's 2011 visit to Chapel Hill (Memorial Hall, University of North Carolina) seems a significant choice given the large numbers of Scots who immigrated to the Carolinas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The geopolitical histories of these performance locales are latent within these stagings. As part of a growing NTS network, each performance activates a city's awareness of contemporary Scottish theatre and political debates whether or not it draws attention overtly to historical acts within the area.Footnote 40 Moreover, the play's annunciation of past alliances and tensions between Scots and Americans fosters competing ideas of a local or national home and the lengths one might go to protect it.
The enactment of banal theatrical nationalism within Black Watch takes place in two distinct homes: the domestic setting of a Scottish pub and the foreign locale of a desert fort (a home away from home) in Iraq. This nationalism unfolds through the actions of an individual (Cammy) and through collectives (acting ensemble, technical team). The spectacular and sentimental staging conventions employed throughout Black Watch may distract viewers from the nationalism enfolded within the production.Footnote 41 The play's NTS affiliation, its welcoming saltire, the sound of bagpipes, and the distinctly regional accents of the characters show themselves overtly. Yet the compelling story of camaraderie and death coupled with the charismatic team of talented actors can, I think, obscure these indicators.Footnote 42 The ability of these Scottish markers to hide in plain sight evidences the banal theatrical nationalism within the performance.
Framed by overt nationalist symbols – the Scottish Parliament-sanctioned NTS, the recalling of wars that solidified the British state, the governmental politics debated by national politicians – Black Watch generates this brand of nationalism in at least two ways. First, the subjects of the play: the soldiers. The ‘banality of their experience of military service’,Footnote 43 and their recounting of it at home, occur through mundane practices: (un)dressing Cammy, reading and sleeping in Camp Dogwood, playing pool in a Scottish pub, watching war footage on screens. These acts accrue meaning as an ensemble of individuals experience them, at times, through a synchronized physicality – sitting, leaning, standing, marching as one – that suggests a unified, albeit temporary, disposition. The characters’ varying degrees of belonging (to Fife, to their Highland ancestors, to their regiment) challenge a homogeneous notion of Scotland. But their position at the fringes of the former British Empire and the front lines of twenty-first-century (neo-imperialist) battles signals a consolidated collective. The tensions concerning foreign policy, in the play and in conversations swirling during the play's genesis, raise questions about Scotland's political future. With plans for a 2014 independence referendum, the nation's degree of autonomy is uncertain, just as was the outlook for the military regiment in the play as politicians debated the absorption of Black Watch into a mega-Highlander unit. The Scottish operative manoeuvring in Black Watch does not take a stand on national politics but it provides historical context to understand the shape of Scottish soldiers today. It may also stimulate interest in American audiences about Scottish culture and politics, which could lead to financial investment in tourism initiatives such as Homecoming Scotland.Footnote 44
A second element of banal theatrical nationalism comprises the technical skills required to remount Black Watch. The practical logistics of restaging this production year after year introduce mundane but essential labour practices.Footnote 45 The NTS has archived behind-the-scenes documentation of Black Watch and has posted short videos of interviews with the cast and crew discussing rehearsals, the play's music and so on. One video shows sped-up footage of the construction of the production's set and seating over three days.Footnote 46 The digital broadcast gives audiences in the US and elsewhere a sense of the large undertaking and physical challenges presented by this show. The spectacle of national politics or violent warfare is non-existent in this footage of routine assembly. As the production team and cast synchronize their individual efforts, Black Watch takes shape. Crucially this infrastructure provides the footing for it to gain the hearts and minds of audiences abroad while its staging presents a stylized account of the effects of warfare on Scottish foot soldiers. I find it noteworthy that the NTS makes visible this labour that transforms the spectacle and sentimentality of the show into a series of quotidian movements. Beyond the ease of the video's transportability online (which obviously can travel farther and faster than the production), it works on behalf of the NTS by providing potential performance venues with a glimpse into the technical demands of the show and potential spectators with a ‘backstage pass’ into the show's inner workings.
The theatrical unfolding of Black Watch encompasses multiple self-reflexive acts. In its metatheatricality, the production functions similarly to Gulf War plays, as delineated by literary scholar Jeanne Colleran. In scrutinizing the relationship between media, image production and war, Colleran has identified in theatre (as opposed to television or print journalism) an ‘ability to interrogate signs and call attention to the performative process, to its insistent concern for connections between the present moment and its anterior cause’.Footnote 47 Following from this assertion, while the behind-the-scenes footage calls attention to the technical creation of the show, the performance of Black Watch calls attention to the making of soldiers (recruitment, training, tactical advice, deployment, storytelling) and the shifting sociopolitical realities that they face at home and in battle. The debate about the regiment's future, depicted by live actors and mediated simultaneously through screens onstage, highlights the discourse about Scotland's historical subjecthood. Black Watch foregrounds markers of nationalism with an eye toward critique through the live streaming of the political figures and the spectacle of the military tattoo linked to the saltire and opening music.Footnote 48 The banal objects with which the characters interact (pool cues, letters, camera phones, a torn-up book, smutty posters) contribute to the ‘cultural matrix’ of identity that assembles Scottishness in the Iraqi fort. As the production travels across the US, these props join with the physical components (metal rods, speakers, sound and lighting boards, transport vehicles) necessary to restage the story of the Scottish institution that was the Black Watch. This circulating assemblage further includes histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American battles involving British soldiers and twenty-first-century debates about foreign policy.
Final additions to this cultural matrix
In 1998 the US Senate passed Resolution 155, which designated 6 April as National Tartan Day. 6 April (1320) is the day that fifty-one magnates and nobles signed the Declaration of Arbroath, the document that articulated Scotland's independence from England. The US Resolution notes that the American Declaration of Independence used this Scottish document as a ‘model.’ It explains,
this resolution honors the major role that Scottish Americans played in the founding of this Nation, such as the fact that almost half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were of Scottish descent, the Governors in 9 of the original 13 States were of Scottish ancestry, Scottish Americans successfully helped shape this country in its formative years and guide this Nation through its most troubled times.Footnote 49
That many soldiers fighting against the American colonists were Scottish, hence Cammy's observation of the lack of battle honours, undoes this expressly celebratory narrative. That Congress did not brand 6 April ‘Scotland Day’ or ‘Scottish American Day’ is curious given the more inclusive nature of these labels, as is the fact that the resolution lists contributions made by Scottish-Americans in fields as varied as medicine, economics, architecture, and the performing arts. National Tartan Day evacuates the multifaceted history of Scots in the US and North America at large; it solidifies a visual representation, through sartorial synecdoche, of Scots in the US. Dressed to Kilt, until its name-change, exemplified this process of narrowly defining and, ultimately, obscuring the cultural practices and labours of Scots.
Just as the Black Watch soldiers in Iraq observed the broader implications of their labours, the eponymous theatre production has carved out a place for itself in today's transnational performing-arts arena. Its director, John Tiffany, observes how thrilling it is to be an ‘ambassador for your country's theatre . . . for your country's art’. He moves beyond a notion of representation when he defines the production: ‘This is Scotland's art.’Footnote 50 As an associate director for the NTS, it is not surprising that Tiffany delineates the national qualities of Black Watch.Footnote 51 Each restaging of Black Watch forwards the Scottish operative, depicted in the production as mobile, coordinated and attentive. As the play travels across the US, it presents this operative through its composite performance of nationalism as both overtly theatrical and subtly mundane.
Black Watch associate director for movement, Steven Hoggett, made a poignant observation about the actor portraying Cammy during ‘Fashion’. Hoggett asserted that the actor needs to do as little as possible while the men (un)dress him. In recalling the advice he had given, he remarked, ‘You wear the mistake.’Footnote 52 I interpret Hoggett's comment to mean that in the event that his dressers mistakenly attire him, Cammy must not physically or verbally indicate the error. Beyond the practicality of this advice I read in this remark something more significant: appearance matters. As an outward cultural expression, clothing is multi-layered. It carries with it the history of its construction and purpose and ultimately leaves itself open to interpretation. Furthermore, in the case of the military uniforms/costumes, clothing re-presents a familiar feature of Scotland while potentially questioning the stakes of such display.
As an operative, Black Watch has served the NTS well. It has delivered a captivating story through acts of precision and surprise, generating respect for and interest in this national arts organization. A challenge for future NTS projects will be to move away from the most recognizable and, arguably, commodified features of Scottish history and culture in order to renew a Scottish operative that exposes its complexities and contradictions in all their splendour. By doing so, the mistakes of the past – be they military, socio-economic, environmental or aesthetic – become significant markers of a self-reflexive and adaptable nation on the move.
