You can get an interesting perspective on drama about the First World War by looking at how the conflict was presented on the stage during and just after the war itself. After hostilities began in 1914 the plays tended to concentrate on love and duty and German spies. The romance and comedy persisted, with plays about spiritualism and assumed identity becoming popular to deal with the grief of the bereaved. In the final year of the war the spy count increased even more. In Walter Melville’s The Female Hun an unlucky army general discovered that both his wife and butler were spies. He shoots the wife. Although the first play to deal with the harsh realities of the trenches is usually said to be R C Sheriff’s Journey’s End, The BBC commissioned and broadcast Reginald Berkeley’s White Chateau especially for Armistice Day in 1925. Wireless owners were told by the Radio Times to sit in the dark to enhance the effect of what the soldiers had been through. When televised in 1938 local residents complained about the realistic shellfire at Alexandra Palace.

So realism was a while coming to the drama of the Great War. And all since have struggled to make the balance between realism and propaganda, polemic and entertainment. This is an even more tricky task if the writer decides to mix the present and the past as Alice Collins did in Sons of Paradise.

Chas and George join the Pals battalion in Sheffield full of enthusiasm. Ninety years later Charles struggles to a final trip to the old battlefields and struggles to come to terms with his memories in the company of his carer, Ian. In 1914 Chas is full of enthusiasm for the trip across the channel and cajoles the younger and shyer George into enlisting straight away - but it is George who wises up to the enormity of their situation first once they are travers la Manche, courtesy of a close encounter with a dismembered German. He has rather quickly become a war poet and puts his disquiet into verse : “But when you dig the shit hole and you get down two feet deep you find some tangled body parts that makes your pale flesh creep.” He is already on a course that will take him out of the war and back home to protest the war Sassoon-like, leaving a deep divide between him and Chas.

Meanwhile back in the twenty first century, Charles is feted as a hero - the last surviving soldier of World War One, with a state funeral on the cards - whether he likes it or not. But Charles does not see himself as a hero, and he has his reasons. Sebastian Chrispin gave Chas a jaunty, confident air. A cheeky chappy very sure of the need for everyone to stick together in the face of the enemy : “If it’s got your name on it’s got your number. No good worrying”, and sure of his need for the local French barmaid : “I’d like to be in your cash till, Phyllis”. He had the bearing of an ordinary bloke who was performing an extraordinary service for his country. It was good to see him on a Tower stage again. Adam Hampton-Matthews as George raged against the machine and paid the price for it, growing up quickly and swapping forge for trench for prison in quite short order. There seemed to me to be a bit too much stuffed into his character for us to believe in him totally, but he reflected the angry bewilderment of those sent to die in a cause they often didn’t really understand.

Stephen Gray as the centenarian Charles was a brooding presence throughout as he never left the stage, observing a past he could still feel and see, shouting at himself and those lost in the hope of changing what could never be changed. This was a creation of great skill, affecting and amusing in equal measure. His double act with his carer Ian was good value for money and produced most of the play’s laughs. “Hast thou been milking cow?” he asks testily when Ian takes a while to make a cup of tea. James Kileen’s Ian grew on me as the play went on sharing the jokes with Charles - “Well, you can’t give your body to science, They’ll give it back”, but ultimately caring for him deeply, making sure he didn’t alienate everybody before he passed on.

I thought that Ella Imms certainly looked the part of French barmaid Phyllis, and dropped dead very convincingly when shot by the Boche at the end, but felt there should perhaps have been a bit more passion and sparkle in her speeches and steps. Chas always seemed much more enamoured of her than she of him. Maeve Elmore’s Wendy the great niece of George, coming to see Charles at his invitation, was caught a bit between showing how detached today’s youngsters can be from long gone events and how they can still relate to those tragic times. I would have liked to see a bit more of Wendy and Charles together, giving the characters more time to develop an understanding. As it stood it felt a bit rushed and gone too soon. We had probably been a bit longer in France than we needed to be.

Michael Fife had the unusual task of being French, English and German in the same play. Liberated, Liberator and Occupier all in the same night he seemed to relish his tricolor of nationalities, at his best as the civil servant with a not yet dead body to move from Sheffield to Westminster Abbey.

I liked the divided past and present set by Anna Kezia Williams and was impressed by Irena Pancer’s immaculate uniforms. The tape of a state funeral fading in and out of proceedings worked well and closed proceedings with appropriate solemnity. Lily Ann Green marshaled her troops efficiently but overall I thought the play tried to do a bit too much taking in pacifism, patriotism, memory, romance, generational politics and some else besides; all the elements of Great War plays rather than concentrating on a few. But it would be wrong to underplay the creation of the production and everything that has gone into bringing it to the stage. It is a proud achievement.

Photography by Ruth Anthony