Birdsong, adapted from Sebastian Faulks’s wildly popular novel of the same name by Rachel Wagstaff, is, as director Anastasia Bruce-Jones puts it, a production which was always going to present unique challenges.

The play is split between the 1910s and the war, with actors doubling and even tripling certain roles to tell an intergenerational and international story of war, trauma and the people whose lives are touched by horrific events. This has required extremely tight and regimented acting, as Bruce-Jones tells me: “The most difficult part of the adaption from a novel to actually acting out the story is definitely the mad flipping between characters, which sometimes happens about every three lines. We’ve been very conscious of this, and what we’ve found has really helped is having a more experienced sound and light team in the box to keep things slick.”

But she tells me that it has been the energy of the actors that has helped the most. And this energy is palpable, even as the cast and crew arrive one by one at the ADC’s Larkum Studio, pouring noise and vitality into the room to the extent that a front of house worker comes in halfway through the rehearsal to ask the cast to keep it down, as the noise is threatening to spill over into the main show going on across the hall.

“This exploration of context and of the lives of First World War soldiers as individuals, rather than as homogenous grains of sand on a beach, as it were, is central to the way the directorial team have guided rehearsal”

What really makes this show exciting, though, is how this raw vigour is channelled and focused by the actors and the directorial team with striking and painstaking attention to detail. The delicate and incredibly thorough approach taken on by the cast and crew becomes ostensibly clear when about an hour of rehearsal time is dedicated to fine-tuning a scene which lasts no more than five minutes, making tiny adjustments to positioning, volume and pace.

For Bruce-Jones, it is obvious that this is an extremely personal dramatic project, as she recounts her classmates’ reaction to finding out what her father did for a living: “My dad used to be in the Marines, and the reaction I got from other kids at primary school was often, ‘Oh wow, what a sacrifice he’s making!’, and while it’s good to recognise what the military go through and sacrifice for their country, it’s also important to remember that they are people in their own right, just like everyone else. We treat First World War soldiers as heroes with no context, which doesn’t help.”

This exploration of context and of the lives of First World War soldiers as individuals, rather than as homogenous grains of sand on a beach, as it were, is central to the way the directorial team have guided rehearsal. Scenes were rehearsed in ‘chronological’ order (i.e. in the order in which the events occur in history, rather than the order of the script, which frequently jumps from one decade to another), and actors who have no lines in any of the scenes being rehearsed are still very much a part of the practice, jumping in to read lines and filling the stage in crowd scenes to help sustain atmosphere and add realism.

Review: Hamp

Birdsong is a deeply personal labour of love for all involved, even down to the ingeniously designed flyers, which carry instructions on how to fold the flyer into an origami bird. The play looks set to be an exciting and vividly raw exploration of human emotion and human misery, and the all-important context which shapes our lives.

Birdsong runs from Tues 2nd - Sat 6th May 2017 at 7:45pm at the ADC theatre