As a girl growing up in rural Australia, Elsie dreams of adventure.  Then war arrives – the First World War – and with fateful irony, Elsie’s wishes come true.  Volunteering as a nurse, she travels to Egypt and later to France, making the most of the longed-for opportunity yet worrying all the time about those she holds dear.  We meet her now in a period of calmness, stationed at a hospital far behind the front line, where (in an echo of The English Patient) she’s caring for a mysterious British man whose own war story will only slowly be told.

Given the plethora of plays about the First World War centenary, you’d be forgiven for feeling a certain degree of fatigue; but War Stories uses a few intelligent devices to deliver something new.  Firstly and crucially, it throws the focus on just two specific people, relating both the tragedy and the adventure of war on a comprehensible human scale.  Secondly, patient Bernard’s memory isn’t working as it should; he’s only now recalling the horrors unfolding in Europe, giving us, the audience, a parallel sense that we’re learning them anew.

But most of all, for British audiences at least, making the protagonist a rural Australian proves an inspired move.  Our own unfamiliarity with her way of life echoes the sense of otherness she feels in Egypt – and her tale is made more striking by being set on the Eastern Front, a theatre of war which Brits often overlook.  It would be fascinating to know if an Aussie crowd has the same response to the Bernard’s story, with its to-us familiar imagery of mud in the Somme.

Some beautifully evocative detail helps to draw us in.  The memory of home baking, mentioned casually at the start, becomes a key motif as the story develops, while a grim description of an Australian sheep cull sets the tone for Elsie’s experience of war.  The shock and horror of Gallipoli is reflected in a sudden auditory assault – albeit one of music, not gunfire – and the script is full of elegant segues, moving seamlessly but clearly from one time to another.

But the ending confused me, just a touch.  The two characters’ stories, which until then have followed separate paths, come together in a kind of shared memory, a terrible narrative that Bernard claims is fiction but is clearly more real than it seems.  At first, I read this as a sign that their lives really were intertwined; but I wonder now if they’re simply imagining their own experiences as part of each other’s stories.  The intent could usefully be clearer here, even if that just means signalling that we’re not supposed to be sure.

That one distracting uncertainty aside, War Stories is a masterful script, and a credit to the trans-national playwright pairing of Australian Emma Gibson and the British Rob Johnston.  Their skill is matched by actors Verity Henry and Joel Parry, whose nuanced, reined-back performances still deliver profound tension in the more emotional scenes.  War is hell, as this play makes clear, but it’s nonetheless transcended by the fundamental forces which shape us.  And it’s those forces which define this play: the flush of love, the pull of family, and the overwhelming human drive to experience our world to the full.