'Soldiers' explores the hotly contested morality of Winston Churchill's role in the devastating saturation bombing of Hamburg during World War II and the crucial decisions made on the road to victory. Rejected by the National Theatre board and banned by the Lord Chamberlain, this show was finally given its British premiere in 1968 after the Lord Chamberlain's censorship rules were disbanded. For a show that was so contentious at the time - three years after Churchill's death - it surprised me to learn that it had not been staged in London since, and only briefly on the repertory circuit in the early 1990s.

A tricky play to stage, 'Soldiers' needs three distinct locations (H.M.S. Duke of York at Scapa Flow, the annex at number 10 Downing Street and the garden at Chequers), nine period costumes and the inevitable small fringe show budget. The director and I wanted to create the feeling that a lot more was going on around the characters than just the scripted action and to convey a sense of movement and momentum in what could be an otherwise dogmatic play. The director also liked the idea of being able to temporarily divide up the acting space to concentrate the activity to specific areas; to this end I devised a set of transparent screens on castors (principally inspired by a set of glass operations boards which I saw at Admiral Ramsey's bunker at Dover Castle -well worth a visit!). It also allowed Wing Commander Dorland - the link between audience and action - to observe these events without obviously lurking in the corner of the room.

We capitalised on the small acting area at The Finborough Theatre to create a cloistered, windowless world for the play to inhabit where even the windows of the conservatory at Chequers have no view except the grid of a military operations map.