THIS week marks the 10th anniversary of the second Gulf War, the one that at least 750,000 people and maybe as many as two million marched against, when size of crowd and missile just didn’t matter.

Imagine being a soldier on the inside, who did his job but feels that “probably any military death in Iraq was illegal”.

Those feelings have burned away to the point where Bradford-born Matthew Midgley, a former communications engineer in the Royal Signals, has solidified his thought into a searing 80-minute anti-war war play.

Quicksand marks the debut of Tempting Fate, a new York theatre company set up by Midgley, now a 30-year-old student on the PhD playwriting course at the University of York, and burgeoning director Ruby Clarke, artistic director of York Theatre Royal’s 2013 TakeOver Festival.

The Bar Lane Studios Basement becomes “a cross between a Blitz shelter and a squat”, as Midgley describes it, to evoke the living conditions in the Kuwaiti desert in January 2003 where soldiers Lance Corporal Si Jennings (Samuel Thorpe-Spinks), Magic (Luke James), Cat (Katie Macintyre) and Youngy (Jake Botterell) are waiting for the invasion.

Magic is the obey-orders leader, carefully preparing his boots and socks with talcum powder; Cat has a young daughter sick with meningitis back home; Youngy can’t wait for some action; and Si is…reading the Observer, unable to believe what’s happening.

You will probably decide that Si is Matthew Midgley, especially when he delivers a closing polemic of controlled anger.

The language is raw; the claustrophobic antagonism is in yer face; the lot of the British soldier with inadequate equipment passionately expressed by Midgley and a very, very committed cast.

“We are not free, but neither are you,” says Si at the finale, depicting a nation sinking in quicksand.

Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk