The Accrington Pals by Peter Whelan

They lived as they died. Side by side. On the eve of the outbreak of the First World War, the young men of Accrington responded to Kitchener’s call for a ‘New Army’ and became the smallest town in England to form a ‘Pals Volunteer Regiment’. The play spans the period up to the Battle of the Somme in 1916, when the men who jauntily marched off to war faced the brutal reality of the trenches.

However the play is less about the men at the front and more about the women they left behind and how they dealt with their emotional losses. A deeply humane play dramatising a close- knit community caught up in historical events. A fitting choice of play to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the war in 1914.