Historians of a war give us the broad sweep but few of the details that face us with its horror. Thirty years ago archivists from the Imperial War Museum began tracing survivors from the First World War to tape their memories and create an oral record of what they had been through. A large proportion was contributed by men who had fought as privates or NCOs, and since most written records had been the work of officers, these taped accounts valuably redressed an imbalance.

Max Arthur drew on this vast archive for an anthology published five years ago, and now Malcolm McKay draws on the anthology for a stage version that doesn’t work well when it tries to be a play, but contains enough hard evidence of pointless suffering to grip our attention and our pity.

His five speakers are composite figures, drawn from the experience of several interviewees, who meet up in a restroom at the museum after recording their testimony – the American arriving, aptly, almost at the end. Soon they are swapping reminiscences, the same, we presume, that they have just taped.

Dominating Douglas Heaps’s set is John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed, in which a line of blinded soldiers shuffles past a field of corpses, and this image unforgettably reminds us of what four of the now neatly dressed and grey-haired veterans sitting beneath it once saw daily.

The fifth is Kitty, a munitions worker, who not only provides a civilian’s view but that of a woman whose husband impetuously volunteers. Belinda Lang most delicately shows her puzzlement and anguish – responses far from the enthusiasm displayed by Rupert Frazer’s Captain, so well-spoken, so dewy-eyed, who seems to embody every cliché of the public schoolboy keen on a scrap.

The hazards of pretending that these monologues are one half of a duologue is shown when Matthew Kelly’s outraged, tearful Private or Timothy Woodward’s brooding Sergeant – both finely detailed performances – indicate their loathing of staff officers, to which you want the Captain to respond, but of course he can’t.

Only at the end is his idealism pulverised by the horror of yet another retreat, confirming that, while the evening works only fitfully as a play, the sequence of spoken testimony leaves one appalled and angry at the futile slaughter of it all.

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