Tuesday, February 21, 2006

I left Rome and landed in Brussels

Last night I went to the theatre to see a play called the Schuman Plan. As you can tell by the title it's a 'political play' on the creation of the European Union. Now, I'm as European as you can get in Britain (French mother/English father) and there are a good few of us (a friend of mine who like me lived abroad throughout his childhood refers to us as being "Eurobrats") and we all know that such a play is likely to be watched by an essentially anti-European UK public, but I didn't think that it would make me hate the rest of the crowd.
The play started out as a fairly balanced argument on teh pros and cons of European integration and went back and forth throughout history. Then after the break it became a Daily Express reader's wet dream as the 'poignant' ( note that the quotes indicate irony) drama unfolds when a fisherman takes his own life after too much interference from the EU.
Now I know that I am not a fisherman, but 20,000 odd fisherman vs economic benefits for the whole exonomy and the rest of the UK population. Not much of an argument there (but then, it wasn't really addressed). What was funny was the fact that the crowd were laughing a bit too much at jokes which could be construed as xenophobic and were also prone to shouting out little grunts of approval, "hear, hear" said an old bloke as one of the characters on stage spoke of Britain leaving the EU. He also shouted "Bravo" at the end in a comedy upper class voice, along with his fat wife. The public laped it up like it was a junkie addicted to lies and fabrications.

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