WARTIME HEROES, as every tabloid headline writer knows, are a breed apart. Judging from RC Sherriff's 1929 play, based on his own experiences in the trenches during the First World War, its author clearly recognised such notions as a double-edged sword.

Set 50 yards from the front line, a symbolic No Man's Land between death and glory becomes an outpost of Old England kept alive by an officer class fully aware of how fragile the social pecking order can be. Into this outpost comes Raleigh, eyes wide with tales of derring-do and a little bit in love with Captain Stanhope, a real-life Boy's Own adventurer, three years his senior at school and now in charge of the post. For Stanhope, though, such is the price of heroism that the spoils of war have left him hollow and numb to the fear and loathing required to get by.

This is an unremittingly bleak affair, and you can see why Howard Barker's 1970s big-screen adaptation, Aces High, went airborne. For all the play's stiff-upper-lipped pukkaness, however, Sherriff's language sounds grittily fresh in David Grindley's darkly claustrophobic production.

With a steely ensemble cast led by Tom Wisdom as Stanhope and Richard Glaves as Raleigh, this is as much the latter's rites of passage as it is commentary on the futility of war. Reeking as it does too with the tuckbox bravado and homo-erotic repression of an all-boys public school, it's a timely reminder of the prevailing iniquities of the British class system, where weaklings are bullied while others take up arms and make sacrifice for king - or queen - and country.

The final image here, of bombs falling in black-out, is a living monument to life during wartime beyond the action-man image that guards some still-imagined dream of empires long since past.