THIS is the first of two plays in successive weeks at York Theatre Royal that turn our attention to the 100th anniversary of the First World War.

Deborah McAndrew's new commission for Northern Broadsides, An August Bank Holiday Lark, will focus on the community who stayed behind in rural Lancashire in 1914 until the war gradually drowned out the clog dancing in Wakes week.

In Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, the soldiers at the Western Front in France are at the core of his lament to the degradation of war, as the birds continue their singing amid the "utter madness" of man's behaviour towards his fellow man at the bloody Somme.

Faulks initially questioned Rachel Wagstaff's desire to adapt his two million-selling novel for the stage, asking "Why try to make a sculpture out of a painting?", but he is content with the latest version, now doing the touring rounds. "It seems to flow much more smoothly, with memories conjured as and when Stephen is haunted by his past,” he has said.

Wagstaff's play and indeed Alastair Whatley's direction for the Original Theatre Company gives the story an overlapping structure that begins in the trenches as the men under the command of young Stephen Wraysford (George Banks) must make their way through the sprawling tunnels beneath the fields of France.

A blast that sends him to a hospital bed will transport Wraysford via the first of a series of juddering balletic movements back to pre-war France, where he embarked on a passionate, dangerous liaison with Isabelle (Carolin Stoltz), the love-starved, abused second wife of Rene Azaire (Malcolm James). The play then switches between the two settings, as he rises from his bed or staggers back to it, as if fighting for breath.

Victoria Spearing's set , aided by Alex Wardle's lighting, has the permanent shadow of the Somme's battlefield, trenches and tunnels, with the sky tantalisingly above as the war progresses like one long strangulation from 1916 to 1918. In front, the Azaire household and the Amiens community in 1910 is evoked with swift changes of scenery and a revolving door.

There will be those whose judgement is coloured by having read the book with its triptych structure of love affair, war, end of war/love affair, but your reviewer saw it on Monday without that encumbrance, assessing it solely as a play; one that stands comparison with Journey's End and The Accrington Pals in a year that also has seen the revival of Oh What A Lovely War at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East.

Director Whatley, who also plays Levi, has cast his production superbly, Banks being far superior to Eddie Redmayne's pouting turn in the disappointing television version. Banks's Wraysford combines courage in the field with growing outrage at the futility of war and fulminating frustration at the hand foiled love has dealt him, while Carolin Stoltz is a luminescent Isabelle.

Peter Duncan's dutiful, unbending Jack Firebrace buries his way into your questioning conscience and the musical arrangements of Tim Van Eyken and violin playing and singing of Samuel Martin's Evans will haunt you like the birdsong.

Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, The Original Theatre Company and Birdsong Productions, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2pm, tomorrow and 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk