The Wipers Times at The Arts Theatre

Went to see The Wipers Times last night. It's Ian Hislops play about the magazine produced in the trenches of Ypres in the first world war. Well worth a visit. It gives a classic illustration of all that is good and all that is bad about Britian. The finest feature of the British is how we adopt a grim gallows humour that gets us through adversity and we find a way to make do. We have a healthy disregard for authority, but when we have to we do our duty. The worst feature is the total disregard of those in power for the poor sods who have to suffer the decisions of those who run the show. The show displays how the staff were more worried about the effects of drunkeness on troops than on their own awful strategies, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. To quote David Byrne of Talking Heads "Same as it ever was"

You realise just how much has changed and how little has changed in 100 years. Perhaps the two lessons I took away from it are a) Strong Leaders are dangerous, especially in relation to Europe and b) After 100 years the Daily Mail is as much of a rag, full of misinformation as it ever was!