NARVIK, Lizzie Nunnery’s memory play with foreboding folk songs, tells the enigmatic story of a Liverpudlian man and a Norwegian woman pulled together yet torn apart by war as the events of one summer cause ripples across an ocean of time.

Directed by University of York alumnus Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder, the ensemble production by Manchester company Box Of Tricks has played the York Theatre Royal Studio and Leeds Carriageworks already last month, but each for one night only.

This week, however, there are six opportunities to see Nunnery’s haunting work in Harrogate, and the journey is well worth it for this outstanding touring show, staged by actors Joe Shipman, Lucas Smith and Nina Yndis and accompanying musicians Vidar Norheim, Maz O’Connor and Joe Hirons.

Drawing on the Second World War experiences of her grandfather, who sailed with the Royal Navy to liberate the Norwegian port of Narvik in April 1940, Liverpool playwright and songwriter Lizzie Nunnery has created an 85-minute documentary play where melancholic ballads meet poetic words to deeply moving effect, all the more so for being performed straight through without an interval.

Bittersweet memory and dream elide with truth and fantasy in Nunnery’s story of love, guilt, heroism and betrayal as Nunnery knits two strands together on Katie Scott’s claustrophobic set.

Joe Shipman’s Jim Callaghan is first encountered as a 90-year-old man, alone in present-day Liverpool, plagued by guilt as he plays out his past over and over in his head in mumbling patterns of speech before losing consciousness as he falls in his home basement, all at sea with himself.

Nunnery transports Jim in this hallucinatory state to the source of those troubling thoughts: when he and Lucas Smith’s radio operator Kenny Atwood set out on a North Atlantic convoy from Scotland to Norway, buoyed by hope and fuelled with courage, but destined to spend long nights in the signal room of a destroyer.

Young Jim first encounters Norwegian school teacher Else Dahl (Nina Yndis) before the war when he works as a trawlerman, and love blossoms, but she is an enigmatic figure, a freer spirit than Jim, and what later ensues will have devastating consequences for him. What’s more, the demands of war, the horrors of what he is called on to do, will never leave him.

Moving between past and present, the full story gradually emerges but first you must travel on a journey that is as elusive, mysterious and enigmatic as Else herself. Nunnery’s music, a combination of fragmented shanties and ballads, adds to that sense of mystery, as Box Of Tricks live up to their name with a theatre style that combines sleight of hand with a knockout punch.

Narvik, Box Of Tricks, on tour at Harrogate Theatre Studio Theatre, tonight to Saturday, 7.45pm and 2.45pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01423 502116 or harrogatetheatre.co.uk