FOR York Shakespeare Project's 28th show on the road to presenting all 37 over 20 years, the committee announced it would be the community project's first all-female production.

From 25 pitches, director-designer Maggie Smales won the day with her suggestion to set Henry V during the First World War at the Barnbow munitions factory, just outside Leeds, to mark both the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt as well as the on-going reflections on the Great War. As many as 18,000 Yorkshire women and girls worked at Barnbow, plenty of them from York.

We are accustomed to Shakespeare's plays being pulled and pushed this way and that in pursuit of resonance, relevance and new insights, and YSP's cast, director and production team emerge as triumphant as King Harry, as they explore the meaning of war through Shakespeare’s discourse.

Smales has the Barnbow lasses in uniform march briskly past the chattering bar and up the stairs, called to order to start their daily shift with banter and wartime factory songs; a scene through which audience members must walk to take their seats after passing wartime posters on their ascent.

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Cry, Harry: the transformative moment in York Shakespeare Project's Henry V. Picture: Michael J Oakes

Smales has the stage facing the opposite way to usual, towards the single exit, with a bank of scaffolding and minutiae of the munitions factory, and the effect in this black-box studio is to make the atmosphere more confrontational. "Danger Live Explosives" reads one sign, an omen of what was to come at Barnbow in a fatal explosion in December 1916. Overhead, Sara Burns's lighting apes myriad Yorkshire factories.

Suddenly, one worker solemnly carries on a package. Inside is a uniform, the symbol of loss on the Front for Claire Morley's factory girl, who is urged by all her co-workers to put on the jacket, whereupon she becomes Henry V and now the game's afoot. It is a brilliantly effective transformation, all the "lasses" then taking on roles that retain their original titles.

What comes through is our human characteristics, not whether they are male or female, and Morley, who is a natural headgirl in demeanour, captures both the idealised hero, once taken to extremis by Laurence Olivier, and Henry's less savoury, ruthless side.

There are impressive performances too from Rosy Rowley's Pistol and the gold-star emerging talents of Lily Luty's Katherine, Charlotte Wood's Montjoy and Imogen Little in a trio of roles, each actress handling a French accent or even French dialogue with élan.

Maggie Smales had wished to point up the "full spectrum of class and rank" in her interpretation of Henry V, and her thought-provoking production does indeed convey how Shakespeare's play is "as much about the experiences of war for the people living through it as it is about those who wage it".

This assertion peaks in one of the most moving moments in YSP's 13 years as Henry V's declamation of the list of the dead at Agincourt fades out, to be replaced by the Barnbow munitionettes walking off stage one by one as they name those who died in the 1916 factory explosion. What a fitting memorial to the oft forgotten Yorkshire women who sacrificed their lives.

Henry V, York Shakespeare Project, at Upstage Centre, 41 Monkgate, York until October 31; 7.30pm (except October 25), plus 2.30pm, tomorrow and next Saturday, and 3pm, Sunday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk