DO you know of the neglected story of the Barnbow Lasses, the many thousands of them, who worked at the secret munitions factory in Cross Gates, Leeds during the First World War, some of them taking the train from York to do so?

The canary girls were so called because the poisonous TNT used in making shells turned their skin a jaundiced yellow in their toxic workplace.

Two factory-worker sisters with their own combustible chemistry, Colette O’Rourke’s volatile, spirited Agnes and Tilly Steele’s by-the-book, junior Sunday school teacher Edith, are at the heart of Barnbow Canaries, Leeds playwright Alice Nutter’s commission from the West Yorkshire Playhouse to mark the Barnbow Lasses’ sacrifice and bravery.

To Nutter, these women were “our frontline troops facing poisoning and risking death”, tasting freedom and prosperity for the first time with “danger money” in their pocket but let down by broken promises.

If this sounds polemical, the ever-fiery Nutter has never shied away from social politics, but she tells the story with humour, joy, sisterhood solidarity and Yorkshire earthiness to go with the anger, sense of injustice and delayed recognition at last.

Director Kate Wasserberg and her production team conjure memorable imagery and sonic impact, be it the community chorus’s First World War songs and dancing, Mark Bailey’s factory design; spoof newsreel vignettes from the Front, or Dyfan Jones’s clattering sound designs.

Barnbow Canaries, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until July 9. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk