WINSTON Churchill’s oratory echoes down the ages… we will fight them on the beaches, in the hills, we shall never surrender.

But what would have really happened had the Germans invaded mainland Britain in the summer of 1940? The most likely scenario would have been some resistance but otherwise it would most likely have been collaboration on a massive scale.

Writer Giuliano Crispini more than hints at this unpalatable reality in his study of how a Channel Islands community first becomes cowed and then compliant in the face of overwhelming oppression by an occupying force.

Skilfully portraying the bleakness and initial hopelessness of the situation, he also confronts us with the awful truth that most of us – if faced with impossible choices – could not put hands on hearts and promise to stay true to ideals, let alone personal relationships.

It is late spring in that fateful year. Guernsey has been softened up by the Luftwaffe and now the jack-booted Wehrmacht has arrived to impose endless rules, regulations and a myriad of petty tyrannies.

General Rolf Bernberg arrives unannounced at the home of a woman called Lotty, who has just lost her father during a German air raid. Her boyfriend Ben plans to hide to escape deportation to the Reich.

However, Bernberg is no strutting, bullying Nazi. And it is perhaps because there is the merest modicum of humanity in his soul that Lotty, played with intense emotion by Olivia Hallinan, eventually succumbs.

Hostility turns to hospitality… and that in turn leads to other things. Ms Hallinan’s dramatic, butterfly mood changes perfectly convey the inherent awfulness of their different predicaments.

Relentlessly, and much like a military operation, the general wears down and finally breaches his host’s defences. Here we have a stunning piece of character acting, Mark Letheren’s ‘German officer just obeying orders’ giving us real insight into what it feels like to be snared by the twin traps of love and duty.

Meanwhile, Adam Gillen’s poignant take on Ben provides some idea of what it must have felt like for the young men of Guernsey as they had to stand by and see their island paradise become a prison.

But above all, Lotty’s War serves as a reminder to the audience that when the chips are down, none of us really knows how we would react. It is a remarkable piece of theatre and will soon deservedly be moving to London’s West End.

It runs until Saturday (September 20).