WHEN the final drums sound, will you fight for the revolution or for the one you love?

It is not an everyday choice, but the question is universal: should you follow your heart above all else, as Edward VIII did.

This early Bertolt Brecht play, written in the aftermath of the First World War in a Berlin riven by revolution, combines the political with the personal in its pained love story in the tradition of Greek dramas. Pre-dating theatre of alienation, it is instead "theatre of entertainment," suggests director Claire Morley.

And she is right, Drums is more entertaining than you might expect, as rowdy as a Joe Orton comedy, its behaviour lubricated by liberal consumption of kirsch and schnapps. Being Brecht, they reach for the booze not merely to get smashed; it is a deeper need and everyone is at it, be it Tim Holman's bar man, Andy Love's Drunk or the increasingly desperate Karl (Ian Giles) and Amelie Balicke |(Beryl Nairn).

They are determined to marry daughter Anna (Emma Dubruel) off to the gauche, newly moneyed Friedrich Murk (James Witchwood), four years on from her true love, soldier Andreas Kragler (George Stagnell) going missing, presumed dead, in Africa.

Who should turn up but Andreas, impoverished and scarred and now doubly so after learning of Anna's unfaithful behaviour. Stagnell captures his conflicted torment; Dubruel conveys a young girl pulled this way and that, yet with a wilful streak too; Witchwood's Murk is amusingly ghastly.

Giles and Holman are tremendous; the ensemble singing is lusty and ribald; the traverse stage adds to the friction and if John Willett's adaptation still leaves certain Brecht imagery beyond comprehension, Morley's ensemble company gives it both barrels.

Drums In The Night, York Settlement Community Players, Friargate Theatre, York, 7.30pm tonight; 2pm and 7.30pm tomorrow. Box office: 01904 613000 or ridinglights.org