Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 19 March

In Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen declares “what passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” That sentiment echoes throughout R C Sherriff’s Journey’s End. The 1928 drama was based on Sherriff’s own experiences in France. The play itself spans four days in a dugout, as British Army officers preparing for a fatal attack confront the prospect of death, survival and tinned apricots.

Sherriff’s script captures British humour and a sense of patriotism among the soldiers in the brutal conditions they have to endure. Jonathan Fensom’s set, a low-lit bunker at the front of the King’s black, hollow stage is both intimate and intense. Thematically and structurally, Journey’s End leaves no ambiguity of when it was written; long and concentrated scenes combined with thorough characterisation that command attention is evidence of naturalism that dominated Western stages in the early twentieth century. Yet, the play takes no sides and instead presents the relentless and seemingly purposeless nature of war. Journey’s End portrays and humanises the otherwise incomprehensibly large numbers of young men who died fighting. It does this without glory or sentimentality, only the harrowing and ‘monstrous anger’ of gunfire.