★★★☆☆ The play starts in a wartime waste ground. Four young girls gather to play out imaginary games. They like to scare each other with ideas of killing their mothers or summoning the dead or bragging about going to the ‘boys’ den’. Life itself seems a threat, yet full of possibility.

★★★★☆ In Louis de Bernières’ epic tale of love and war set in the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Second World War, he seeks to make the social every bit as important as the political history. Within the grand sweep of military operations are the lives of ordinary people caught up . . . .