THE futility of war, the folly and the horror, and the lies that serve the bloodshed of the battlefield are writ large across Peter Whelan's The Accrington Pals.

What a timely and prescient revival it is receiving at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, as another 70,000 American soldiers head for the Gulf.

Whelan delves into a shaming piece of military history, when Accrington in Lancashire was the smallest town in Britain to raise a battalion to fight in the First World War. In 1914, 1,100 men, affectionately known as The Pals, enlisted in ten days; in the first 20 minutes of the Battle of the Somme on July 1 1916, 235 died and 350 were injured. That battle was being sold to the young men as the "final push" but the war dragged on until 1918.

Rebecca Gatward's raw and soulful production is a haunting and sobering night at the theatre of war. Not least when Greg Haiste's idealistic, vulnerable Tom complains of ineffectual footwear in a manner that chimes with the gripes from the British soldiers of today.

On Liz Cooke's shell of a set that doubles as trenches and Accrington domesticity, Whelan observes the changes in civilian life during two years at the outset of the Great War with a combination of affection for close-knit communities and contempt for the machinations of war. The first half depicts a community on the cusp of being torn asunder, bawdy humour off-setting the uncertainty and young nerves, while romance is brought to a head by pressing circumstance.

Post-interval, the focus falls all the more on the women left behind, the lovers, the wives and daughters of Accrington, and the repercussions at home as the Pals prepare for their fatal stagger into no man's land.

That half, aside from two monologues of letters home from the front and the barked, numbing orders of Malcolm Skates's CSM Rivers, the men are but silent cannon fodder, amid the gunfire and exploding mortar and disorientating strobe lighting.

At its epicentre is the emotional turmoil of Zoe Henry's Eva, increasingly sceptical about official misinformation, and the frozen feelings of stall holder May (the remarkable Jane Hazlegrove), who clings blindly to hope, while lambasting forward young girls and ruthlessly nurturing ambitions of opening her own business. Her breaking point, confronted by the spectre of dead, sweet Tom, is almost too painful to watch, as Whelan's impassioned, rational yet angry play from 1981 resonates with the mood of unease at large in Britain.

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Updated: 11:18 Tuesday, March 04, 2003