Review: THE WIPERS TIMES, Arts Theatre

In the mud and the blood and the noise and the fear of Ypres, a raiding party finds an abandoned printing press and two men cook up the Ypres (sorry, Wipers) Times, an irreverent magazine by Tommy Atkins for Tommy Atkins - "like Punch... but funny". Unlike the famous Christmas football match in No Man's Land, we can be certain that this story is true, because copies survive, pages of which are reproduced in this show's excellent programme. This combination of modern English history, journalism and an anti-authoritarian attitude proved predictably irresistible to Ian Hislop and, with long time writing partner, Nick Newman, a play to honour the scribblers in the trenches is the result.

James Dutton plays Captain Roberts, the editor of the WT, as a Bertie Woosterish optimist, the hat forever on the side of the head, the cheek boyishly ruddy, the eye continually on the lookout for a nose to thumb. His second in command, Lieutenant Pearson, is given an easy charm by George Kemp, all upper middle class decency and sang froid in the face of mortal danger. You warm to the pair, even if their puns grate and their relentless bonhomie gets a little wearing,

They get excellent support from an ensemble cast in which Dan Tetsell doubles beautifully as heart of gold NCO Sgt Tyler, the man who keeps the presses rolling and wise old cove, General Mitford, who refuses to stop them. Sam Ducane is suitably uptight channelling Captain Darling as straitlaced Lieutenant Colonel Howfield, a man slowly acquiring a sense of humour to leaven his antagonism to the WT's cheeky chappie articles.

And, inevitably, there is the main problem with the show - you just can't help comparing it with Blackadder Goes Forth, MASH, even Sergeant Bilko, this ground covered by theatre, cinema and television as often as those patches of Flanders mud were 100 years ago. We get the prostitutes, the poetry and the poignancy, but little that is new beyond the source material which, laudable though it is, in terms of journalism, it's at the level of a decent university mag.

Maybe none of that matters. Maybe all that matters is that those names etched into the white stone of the Menin Gate are kept alive: the Smiths and the Stewarts and the Singhs, ordinary blokes with ordinary dreams in an extraordinary nightmare. And, had the curtain been preceded by a grainy black and white photo of an overgrown schoolboy in uniform with the subtitle that he got through the whole bally show only to succumb to the flu epidemic, I would have found it hard to hold back a tear - but these two unorthodox officers did get through and lived lives abroad, their times as the squaddies' editors forgotten.

So, as ever, tales of the lads thrown into the charnel houses of World War I do get to me and plenty like me - even if there isn't much new left to say. The play had done its job.

The Wipers Times is at the Arts Theatre until 13 May and on tour.

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