This play was adapted from a series of letters written by an officer serving in the trenches on the western front.

The challenge was to design a set simple enough both to serve as a backdrop for all the locations the letters were written from - including India and the trenches - and simple enough for two people to put up in forty minutes, load into a small van and transport to the next location. The variety of size and type of venue - ranging from large proscenium arch theatres to small studio spaces - also meant the set had to be flexible enough to look good in any space.

Le Mesurier's trench letters build up such an evocative picture of life on the western front that to attempt to realistically interpret his environment would look clumsy and immobile in comparison. Instead I created a weather-beaten, blank page as backdrop to his words, augmented by video projections of hand-written date captions and selected black and white photos to help set each scene. All of the props for the stories Lieutenant Le Mesurier told came out of an officer's trunk which were then gradually discarded around the stage, creating a heightened sense of the clutter and chaos of trench life.