REVIEW: The Wipers Times

The Wipers Times

Trademark Touring and Watermill Theatre

Sheffield Lyceum

Thursday, November 3 — Saturday, November 5

Five of World War One’s most famous battles were fought there, causing around 1.5 million casualties.

But it was also on these fields, at this time, that the stiff upper lip had probably its finest hour.

As shells rained down and waves of poison gas swept over terrorised Tommies, they penned a parody mag which has gone down in history.

The Wipers Times made light of the carnage all around in prose, verse, satire and cartoons.

Published unofficially by soldiers who stumbled across a printing press, it provided monthly light relief to front-line troops from the constant squalor and death they withstood.

The Wipers Times (the play) began as a film written for the BBC by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop and cartoonist colleague Nick Newman.

The Corporation ignored the script — until it started planning World War One centenary programmes.

The Wipers Times (the film) was screened in 2013, after which Hislop and Newman went on to adapt it for the theatre.

Demobbed Cpt Fred Roberts (James Dutton) visits the Daily News, hoping for a writing job — but the editor (Dan Tetsell) doubts his suitability.

Roberts hands him the Wipers Times, well-known on the home front too, but the editor is unmoved — a sad epilogue to the story yet to be told.

Years earlier, in a captured trench, Roberts and Lt Jack Pearson (George Kemp) instruct their troops to salvage useful materials.

They almost smash a printing press for parts — until Roberts dreams up the eponymous, morale-boosting mag.

Ex-printworker Sergeant Tyler (Tetsell) knocks out the periodical, its contents dreamed up by Roberts and Pearson in the officers’ dugout.

These contents come magically to life as comic sketches and musical numbers, performed atop the trench’s parapet.

Taken straight from the source material, these gags are as amusing now from the safety of a theatre seat as they must have been to a teenage Tommy with little else to laugh about.

Performed with pratfalls and acrobatics, their periodic interruptions make the contrast to the constant crump of artillery fire all the more ominous.

The tale is equal parts side-splitting and heartrending, as gallows humour gags rub shoulders with poems to fallen comrades\!q — just as they did in the Wipers Times.

Twice we even see the pals go over the top, in scenes reminiscent of — and as poignant as — Blackadder’s last hurrah.

This supremely versatile cast leaves no emotion behind — from abject terror to sullen grief, selfless courage and even unbridled mirth.

Pvt Henderson (Kevin Brewer) deserves mention in dispatches for a wordless gurn which had the whole auditorium howling.

Alas, its tour is as tragically short as the war was long, stopping only at the Wolsey Theatre and Salisbury Playhouse now — but the television movie is available on DVD.

Its story is a stark reminder of not just the war’s human cost, but its heroes human nature.

For more information on theatre in Sheffield, visit www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk.