ANYONE who has ever set eyes on the river Somme will have been immediately struck by its beauty and haunting serenity.

In summer, it is a vision of pastoral loveliness, calm as a millpond and fringed by yellow-flowered lilies at its edges. Yet it flows through what was once the charnel house of France.

The Somme. Of all the First World War battle sites, few have such notoriety as this French department, its rolling green fields to this day studded with the white gravestones of countless soldiers.

For it was here in 1916 that the flower of British youth fell like corn before the reaper.

Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks quite obviously identified the apparent contradictions of the landscape and its history, a major reason why his first major novel enjoyed such success.

This dichotomy is mirrored in the love affair between young Englishman Stephen Wraysford and his host’s wife, Isabelle Azaire. Their mutual passion blossoms in Europe’s last summer before the armies march and the guns thunder.

And it is precisely this feeling of stolen time that is captured so skilfully by the Original Theatre Company’s production. From the sunny, leafy avenues of Amiens, we are taken on a nightmare ride down deep into the dank tunnels below no man’s land.

Short while ago, Wraysford was in heaven. Now he has descended into the fires of hell, his idyllic pre-war existence ruptured almost beyond recall, mirroring the shot-blasted trees of Picardy and Flanders.

The cast most certainly step up to the parapet. Incomparably led by Sarah Jayne Dunn and Jonathan Smith, we are also caught up in their rush to destruction, stoically waiting to go over the top.

Smith and Dunn give breath-taking performances as the star shell-crossed lovers, caught in the light of events beyond their control. Tim Treloar as sapper Jack Firebrace is the universal Tommy Atkins, ours is not to reason why… while Charlie G Hawkins’s Tipper is the personification of every mother’s son who died on that summer’s day in 1916.

Rachel Wagstaff’s production of Birdsong is truly epic, a moving and at times heart-rending narrative that effortlessly manages to open up wounds that incredibly – after all this time - still seem to run deep in our national psyche.

It runs until Saturday and should not be missed.