Review – Lotty’s War at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, from Monday, September 15 to Saturday, September 20, 2014.

IT’S hard to imagine the sheer hell the Channel Islanders had to endure when the German Armed Forces invaded and occupied their homeland in the Second World War.

Lotty’s War provides more than a taste of how it must have been for them and in particular the people of Guernsey, where this bitter-sweet story of love and betrayal is set.

The early 1940s was a sad and fearful time for the islands and Giuliano Crispini’s first published play, adapted by Clare Slater, really does bring home those events of 70 years ago.

The trapped inhabitants had a stark choice – survive by living and working with the Germans or resist and face death, whichever way their conscience would lead. Crispini’s writing, inspired by the discovery in the island’s library of an anonymous diary written on tomato packing paper, exquisitely asks what anyone would have done in that situation.

The lines of the love-triangle and that between enemy and friend do become blurred as the years roll by and the time of the occupation lengthens, and Lotty is drawn closer to the Nazi who has commandeered her home and her ‘housekeeping’ services.

The play has been allowed to steadily develop for five or six years now and really does encapsulate the dramatic tension of the times, which ought to stand this latest production from the Guildford Yvonne Arnaud Theatre stable in good stead when it heads to the West End following this national tour.

The period, war theme and location are all authentically captured as the three sides involved during the occupation unfold, along with the maturing change of Lotty from her ankle socks and defiant teenager into German-supplied stockings and wily womanhood.

Olivia Hallinan, who starred in television's Lark Rise to Candleford, is excellent in the title role in this three-hander and really does bring her character to life. There’s wonderful support too from ex-Eastender and Casualty Mark Letheren, as the complex and troubled General Rolf Bernberg – driven by duty but with desires elsewhere, and Benidorm's Adam Gillen, whose Ben de Carteret ripens a little slower than a Guernsey tomato but knows where his duty lies.

It’s quite a short play with a great deal to fit in, especially as it is covering a five year period, but the use of a simple method to move time on works well as it vividly brings to life what the Channel Islanders faced on a daily basis back in the early 1940s.

There's passion, courage and sacrifice. It’s a moving and, in a way, an educational account of those far off days which also eventually offers the defining message of the futility of war.