THE West Yorkshire Playhouse is to stage the world premiere of Colin Teevan's How Many Miles To Basra? from tomorrow.

Originally written as a radio play for BBC Radio 3, the stage version has been developed by Teevan, who examines how definitions of truth and responsibility become blurred in times of war, not only in the armed forces and the political arena but in the media too.

The setting is April 2003 in southern Iraq in where four soldiers, a journalist and their Iraqi translator set off on an unauthorised journey deep into the Iraqi countryside in a disastrous attempt to make amends for the deaths of some local men at a vehicle checkpoint.

"It's changed quite a lot from the radio version but still has the sweep of radio, which is always a theatrical challenge, " says artistic director Ian Brown. "That's something I like, that filmic nature of the writing."

Director and writer have known each other since their days in Edinburgh, where Ian was working at the Traverse Theatre when Colin was a student in the city.

"We thought it would make a good play for us to do because it had been commissioned by the BBC when they wanted a quick response to current events, and it's rare for the BBC to do that.

"It seemed to fit into an unusual slot on the radio and that's probably true with theatre too. Iraq has been a world event that we've had to respond to and it's made us sit up and think about things in the way that the Gulf War didn't."

How Many Miles To Basra?, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, 23 September to October 21 2006. Box office: 0113 213 7700.