DIRECTOR Barrie Rutter gave playwright Deborah McAndrew three instructions in his brief for her latest commission for Northern Broadsides.

He wanted a play to mark the First World War’s centenary; it should be called An August Bank Holiday Lark (from a line in Philip Larkin’s poem, MCMXIV); and it had to be about folk dancing.

She duly sets her “Lark” in rural East Lancashire, opening in summer 1914 during the Wakes Week build-up to the annual Rushcart Festival in the imaginary village of Greenmill.

This northern tradition falls on an August bank holiday and as McAndrew charts village life up to October 1915, she links it the August Offensive in Gallipoli, where “countless Lancashire lads” served.

Their story has not been told in the annals of war plays. Instead of Turkey, our playwrights have looked to the Western Front in RC Sheriff’s1928 work Journey’s End and Peter Whelan’s The Accrington Pals, from 1982.

Sheriff focused on the shattering emotional impact of trench warfare; Whelan divided his play between the men in the Somme’s bloody fields and the women they left behind in Lancashire; McAndrew’s play never leaves Greenmill; Gallipoli is mentioned only in despatches, although it looms increasingly large over the village community where the prevailing sounds had been those of singing, courting, drinking and dancing.

McAndrew’s brief to herself was to “keep it light”, and the mood is one of exuberance until the tide of war cannot be held back any longer as naivety is wiped away by one letter bearing bad news.

Aided by Lis Evans’s set and the New Vic Theatre’s costumes, she builds the play around a celebratory evocation of rural tradition and community – both of which have regrettably diminished since the Second World War and are declining ever faster this century – as we encounter the family of mill squire John Farrar (Rutter, at his most squirely). His two sons, Edward (Jack Quarton) and William (Ben Burman), will take the decision to sign up; daughter Mary (Emily Butterfield) will defy her father’s feud with Alice Armitage (Elizabeth Eves) to marry Alice’s Gallipoli-bound cheeky son Frank (the outstanding Darren Kuppan).

Andrew Whitehead’s bagman Jim Haworth and Mark Thomas’s simple rushcart jockey Herbert Tweddle are among the villagers playing their part in the Morris dancing festivities, while the key journey from innocence to bitterness is taken by Lauryn Redding’s mill girl, Susie Hughes, whose placement of a white feather in the jacket pocket of a villager yet to sign up is the community’s tipping point.

Your reviewer saw this vibrant, poignant production at the Viaduct in Halifax, where, courtesy of composer and choreographer Conrad Nelson and the last composition by the late Mike Waterson, Rutter’s cast of actor-musicians performed with such vigour and passion. You could argue it is almost clogged up with too much clog dancing, but McAndrew’s story wins through; even if you can predict its progress, it still pulls at the heart as much as it brings a smile.

An August Bank Holiday Lark, Northern Broadsides, York Theatre Royal, tonight until Saturday; West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, April 8 to 19; Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, April 22 to 26. Box office: York, 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk; Leeds, 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk; Scarborough, 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com