JOHN Wilson's all-male play For King and Country, originally entitled Hamp after its central character, was premiered back in 1964, but its subject matter is timeless.

That original production first brought the actor John Hurt to public notice, and the play was subsequently filmed by Joseph Losey, with Tom Courtenay and Dirk Bogarde in the cast. It won the British Academy Award for Best Picture.

The Theatre Royal, in association with the Touring Partnership, now mounts a new production, at a time when the play's story and message are never more relevant. Director Tristram Powell and company members visited the battlefields as part of their research.

The Touring Partnership was formed more than a decade ago when the managers of some of the country's leading presenting theatres joined forces to produce for themselves the sort of touring drama they wished to see on their own stages. Creating the Partnership, along with Plymouth's Theatre Royal were organisations like the National Theatre Clwyd Theatr Cymru, and Sheffield Theatres. The Partnership is now recognised as a hallmark of first class theatre.

Trials always make for a strong drama. The narrative of For King and Country is set during the first world war. Shocked and sickened by the carnage inflicted at Passchendaele in which more than 300,000 British soldiers died, Hamp is the sole survivor from his entire battalion. He turns his back on it all and starts to walk home. Arrested and charged with desertion, for his defending officer at his trial he is assigned Captain Hargreaves, who finds that his own outlook on war is severely challenged and changed by the boy's experiences. His sense of duty to Hamp becomes a passionate compulsion to save the prisoner from the firing squad, underscoring the futility of war and its affects on the men who fight.

Conflict, duty, sacrifice – they're all here in John Wilson's gripping and tragic drama, which stands to rank alongside classic war plays such as Journey's End. This production runs at the Theatre Royal only from next Wednesday until Saturday, February 28.