THE stellar reputation of Fringe favourites Les Enfants Terribles, playwright Oliver Lansley and cult singer-songwriter Alexander Wolfe, go before them.

Add the abiding impact of the First World War on the school curriculum, and the topical popularity of the National Theatre’s War Horse, and it was no surprise that The Trench should draw such a large, young attendance to the Theatre Royal last week for one of the most anticipated shows of the second TakeOver 13 programme.

The Trench came garlanded in five-star reviews from last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe, so expectations were very high for Lansley’s play inspired by the true story of a miner who become entombed in a tunnel during the First World War.

Lansley and co-director James Seager send Ben Warwick’s young soldier, Bert, into the horror of that entombment in a psychological drama whose staging has echoes of both the physical theatre work of cult Cornish company Kneehigh and the Greek tragedies of Euripides.

In the dark trench design of Sam Wyer, skilfully lit by Paul Green, the horror constantly threatens to engulf Bert, but not everything in the darkness may be what it seems. Cue puppetry and heightened physical theatricality from a cast also featuring Alexander Scott, Elliott Rennie and Richard Cartwright, as Bert discover a new, strange world beneath the battlefield mud.

Boundaries between reality and fiction blur as Lansley’s play spins its mind games, although his steady rather than exhilarating writing is far outshone by Wolfe’s songs, performed live on guitar by Wolfe with accompaniment from cast members.

If you love the maudlin music of Gavin Clark’s Sunhouse and Clayhill, as film director Shane Meadows does in so many of his films, then you should seek out Wolfe. And the good news is his second album is imminent.